The Comics Reporter

November 30, 2014

OTBP: Cosmogenesis

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Erik Wemple On Two St. Louis Arch Ferguson Cartoons

There's an interesting article from late last week here where Erik Wemple goes over the similarity between the recent New Yorker Ferguson cover by Bob Staake and the similar approach RJ Matson used in a cartoon last summer. I think this stuff is always worth noting because it helps identify cartoonists and institutions that make a habit of not screening ideas more rigorously -- it's almost impossible to prove any thing nefarious from a single example, no matter how egregious and obvious it might seem to a reader or even an aggrieved party. However, someone who takes a shortcut once is bound to do it again -- my bad habits never come in solo servings -- so one hopes people ask these questions as a way of building a case if building a case eventually becomes necessary.

Even though the individual appraisal isn't all that important, in this particular case it doesn't seem to me like Staake's a straight lift of Matson's for the reasons Matson notes and a couple of others. The arch imagery is so generic, and a big chunk of the effectiveness of Staake's cartoon is in the shading choice over a labeling one. If you had shown me the Staake cover and asked me to bet $100 that something similar had already appeared, I would have taken that bet. The supplementary example brought up to flesh out the article is worth noting, too, and might be of greater interest because of its specificity. Still, I always favor the notion that humor repeats itself.

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Not Comics: 1960s Science Fiction Book Club Art

posted 9:50 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: NYT Profiles Jordanian Comics Maker Suleiman Bakhit

Here. I know this is a well-written article because the idea of superheroes as a competing ideology with terrorist mythology is usually the kind of thing that makes me break out in hives. I still only think it's half a case -- I don't know why Superman and Batman (or Jack Bauer, cited in the piece) are assumed to be beneficial mythologies in the very specific context described -- but I like reading someone that passionately involved making it. I also like the idea of looking at all of these comics in terms not just of their existence as kind of cultural signifiers and explainers but for the content of what they're saying in that role.

posted 9:45 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look; Perhaps Buy: Jeremy Eaton 50/50 Sale

posted 9:40 pm PST | Permalink

Linework NW Announces Details Of 2015 Show; To Feature Flexible Exhibitor Tabling

Francois Vigneault and Zack Soto of Portland's Linework NW show have released a bunch of details about the 2015 version of their show. The show debuted in 2014 as a one-day expo at the Sons Of Norway Grieg Lodge with Michael DeForge and Jim Woodring as special guests. With the recent move by the Stumptown Comics organization out of the festival-running business and into a variety of other activities, including a support role with Rose City Comic Con, Linework became the vital comics city's principal arts-comics gathering right out of the starting gate.

The sophomore version of the show is also set for the Norse Hall. There will be significant changes otherwise, though.

* the show will be two days, April 18-19. This was previously announced, I just sort of like bullet points.

* the approach to the two-day show is different than merely extending the show to a second day. Instead of two days with the same exhibitors, the make-up of the floor on the two days will be significantly different. Each day will have its own special guests, and many of the exhibitors will change. A few "anchor" exhibitors will offer the only continuity between the days, essentially making Linework two separate shows. "I'm fairly confident no other show has done this before," said Soto. The idea is to allow the show to breathe a bit and give those that attend the show on both days a different experience each day.

* there will be four special guests. One they have on the line is a really, really good get but they pulled it from this article kind of last second so you and I will both have to wait!

* the Jupiter Hotel, which is a ridiculous place but one I liked very much despite the prison soap (soap with a hole cut into it), will serve as a sponsor. Discount rates will soon be available. I recommend everyone not staying in a house stay there; I had fun.

* the panel programming will be moved from the bar -- which people apparently liked and disliked in nearly equal parts because, well, it's a bar -- to the second floor of the hall, called the lodge room. That sounds very Lars Von Trier.

* exhibitor applications are open from now until December 31.

* an initial list of two-day exhibitors has been made available: Fantagraphics Books, No Brow, Dark Horse Comics, Oni Press, Top Shelf Productions, Adhouse Books, Periscope Studios and Telegraph Gallery.

I'm hoping to attend. I like the way they're playing with the format, and shows begin to feel like themselves in their second year much more than the first. Also: Portland. Also: it may be the only show in April that's not the April 11-12 weekend, and I'm only kidding a little bit about that last one.

posted 3:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Lauren Hinds

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Comics By Request: People, Places In Need Of Funding

By Tom Spurgeon

* hard to imagine a better place for any cash you want to see do some good than with SAW. That group has done a lot with relatively little, so you know the money will be spent well.

* I was e-mailed a link to this Joe Badon crowd-funder, which could use your attention.

* the latest update (well, the one that posted Friday) from James Hudnall is slightly sunnier than the last two very dark ones. Please consider giving.

* during my initial power-through I noticed a few comics/cartooning related books on this list of books that the Ferguson, Missouri library has requested. So if you're in a sponsoring mood, you might check out the list as it stands now.

* finally, when I last looked on Saturday, the crowd-funder for Ed Siemienkowicz was about $3K away from its goal. The artist was diagnosed with cancer, and this is to provide him with the space to better marshall his personal resources to fight it.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Home Guard Holmes

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Not Comics: New Dr. Michael Vassallo Martin Goodman Post

it's actually a story about painted crime magazine covers, but I liked this spread a lot

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* congratulations to the new alt-comics married couple who haven't posted in a public place yet that I know of. You -- and several hundred people -- know who you are. Oh, let's update it at about 10 AM ET: It's Simon Hanselmann and Jacq Cohen, as mentioned in Hanselmann's new TCJ diary.

* here's a short essay in appreciation of the longtime writer/editor Roy Thomas.

* hey, a Charles Schulz list-type article.

* this is interesting to me: Xavier Guilbert tracks mentions of the French-language version of Building Stories in the mainstream press as a way of noting how the medium in general as perceived so that Building Stories stands out against its backdrop.

* Larry Reid noted last weekend for a show now passed that Sub Pop started out as a 'zine; I hadn't seen a cover before, though.

* not comics: Mark Baumgarten talks to Bruce Pavitt.

* Degen Pener talks to Benedikt Taschen.

* finally, Marc Arsenault was the recipient of an old-fashioned magazine profile.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 44th Birthday, Frank Tieri!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 64th Birthday, Gary Panter!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 39th Birthday, Matt Fraction!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 29, 2014

CR Sunday Interview: Zak Sally

*****

The cartoonist, publisher and musician Zak Sally remains one of my favorite interviews in all of comics. A few weeks back, Sally released through his La Mano 21 the latest issue of his series Recidivist, along with one of the all-time declarations how we would prefer his comic be read. Several things distinguish this work from past Sally releases, but whereas earlier works from the Minneapolis-based artist seemed like a refutation of the comics that came before them, this new book seems like a grand summary of his skills as a maker of images as well as a pressing statement on his thoughts and concerns about making art more generally.

We spoke less than 24 hours ago, on a crappy phone recording system that produced a barely audible exchange. It seemed appropriate. I edited a tiny bit for flow, but not as much as you'd think, for the same reason -- I wanted to catch the spirit of our exchange. Please consider buying Recidivist IV, one of the comics of 2014. -- Tom Spurgeon

*****

TOM SPURGEON: The bulk of this conversation will be about Recidivist IV, but I thought we might start out talking about Autoptic, the comics festival you're a big part of that is held in Minneapolis. Autoptic is scheduled for a second time this August after debuting in 2013. That first show received a lot of attention for a number of reasons, including and maybe primarily the PFC workshop that took place the week leading into it. Is it okay if we start there?

ZAK SALLY: Sure.

SPURGEON: How is the show different for you this time around?

SALLY: It's a two-day show instead of a one-day show this time. We're going to expand the music a bit, spotlight the music more this time than we did last time. It's a Saturday and Sunday show so Saturday night will be a show with some national acts.

All of the other things are sort of the same. We're going to partner with Association ChiFouMi to do the PFC (Pierre Feuille Ciseaux) again. We've nailed down 95 percent of the participants in that. I think we're going to be able to announce that probably sometime next week.

SPURGEON: So remind me... was 2013 the first time that you went through that program? Or had you been one of the people that had done one in France? Did you do the 2013 one?

SALLY: No, the first one I was involved in I want to say... 2011? I went over there. That was actually the first time I hung out with Anders Nilsen extensively. The American artists there were me and Anders and Sarah Glidden. That's when I became friends with June Misserey, who spearheaded the whole thing from the beginning and who's one of my favorite people whom I've met in comics. That's kind of why it came over here. For some reason the French version was shitcanned after the year we did it. [Spurgeon laughs] What's that?

SPURGEON: I'm just laughing at the wonderful word, "shitcanned." [Sally laughs] That's a favorite word. [laughter]

SALLY: Yeah, I'm fond of that one, too. So then that happened and then Autoptic started coming together. MCAD, the college I was teaching at, started talking about holding some sort of comics symposium, so it all started coming together at the same time. We just figured out how we could wrap them all up together.

The first Autoptic went really, really, really, really well. The first American PFC went really well, as well.

SPURGEON: What was interesting to me about that is that I heard from a lot of cartoonist who participated, they all called life-changing in a career reorientation sort of way. Maybe not quite as dramatic as that sounds but something definitely real, something that changed the way they look at what they do. And what was fascinating about that is that these were caretoonists at different points in their artistic journey, and yet they all had the same sort of reaction. What was it about that experience that was universal for people, do you think?

SALLY: That's the experience I had when I went over there. I feel like I've told this story a bunch of times, but when I went over there at the invite of a stranger, I thought "This is not my thing, but I'll take a free trip. It sounds interesting, I'll try it out." When I got there and did out, that's the experience I had. It was pretty life-changing for me. I think it was because... it's because... in a large part it's because of June. [laughs] I feel that a lot of cartoonists feel by necessity that this is something you do by yourself. That you kind of sequester yourself away, and all of the processing you do is pretty internal. When you get around a bunch of other cartoonists who kind of feel the same way and you're able...

When you describe PFC, it sounds sort of academic. You're going to go in there, and you're going to run OuBaPo-based experiments to enable collaboration. It sounds very rote and academic, but you get this space with a bunch of cartoonists, and you lock them up, and you say to them, "Hey everybody, we're going to come up with shit together." And the weirder the thing is, the better. You have the freedom do to whatever you want including the freedom not to be successful. It being successful and publishable should be the last thing on your mind.

I think for a lot of cartoonists, that's not a space they get to be in. You get used to being by yourself in this.

SPURGEON: Even when connections are made, it seems a lot of them are collegial and social rather than creative. Or even commercial.

SALLY: Yup.

SPURGEON: They're infrequently creative. How you engage your work is very important to you, Zak. Is the PFC experience powerful to cartoonists because of the corrective element of having these peer-to-peer relationships brought into a creative sphere?

SALLY: Yeah, I think that's the whole thing. I hope I'm not speaking out of turn. But John P. being there in 2013, all of these people were like, "Oh my God, I get to draw with John P." And John P. being like, "Oh my God, all these people draw better than me." [Spurgeon laughs] You know what I mean? All of the people there not in awe of their own process but the other people there in awe of each other. It's a very cartoonist thing, to be aware that everyone has that to a degree. It levels out the playing field, in that every single one of you does something that's pretty amazing. There's times when you feel insecure about what you do, but that's not how everybody else feels about it.

Even Jaime [Hernandez] got up there. I was lucky enough to curate a show for Jaime, he was a special guest. My thought was that this was the farthest thing of being of interest to Jaime... anything snooty. This thing sounds kind of snooty. Formal experimentation. But he went up to that room and he was like, "This is awesome." Then he sat down and did a drawing and everyone in the room started weeping.

SPURGEON: [laughs]

SALLY: You know what I mean? He was really charged up by the proceedings. It's difficult to describe how it works, but it works.

SPURGEON: The other thing you heard about that first show is that, well, it was a first show. The wider community didn't have the reaction in terms of audience and people buying that one might have hoped for. Tell me about developing about that part of the show, getting people to look forward to a show, and going, and buying, and participating. That seems to me a secret ingredient to the great shows, developing that audience over time.

SALLY: One thing we're working on this year... from the very beginning what we've wanted to do with Autoptic and what we still want to do and where we're pushing it is to not make this a comics show. We want to make a show with comics in it and obviously the people putting it together are from that world. And maybe that's the focus of it. But I think all of us would like it to be, I know I would like the umbrella to be a lot more broad. Not a niche comics-for-comics people. But more the idea of art in whatever form people might dig. I think that was difficult to put across for that first show. People have the idea it's going to be about this one thing. And we're trying to say, "Yes it's about that one thing but we hope it's about these other things as well." There's a place for that. It's a seriously literate town.

I love comics show. But I don't go to as many as I used to because I feel that in many ways they've become a closed loop. I want shows that bring in normal people. You know? I don't even know what I mean by normal. My optimal thing is that someone with a marginal knowledge of comics or of design would walk into this thing and be overwhelmed by the breadth of what they're seeing. They might walk in and be into Michael DeForge's stuff and walk out intrigued by Dunetree Rat Collective. That's exciting to me.

SPURGEON: One wonderful thing about the arts scenes in places in the Midwest is that there's frequently an audience different than industry members and other artists. You can build a following of people who are into consuming art of a certain kind without wanting to make it, which is a significant blessing of those places.

SALLY: I've noticed that. It feels a little like that, like everybody is selling stuff to one another.

SPURGEON: Passing around the same $20 bill.

SALLY: Yeah. And that's great in a certain way. That's a bunch of people coming together and sharing what they worked on. In a way, that's a great thing. But it also creates a closed loop. We're all just talking to each other and selling to each other. That can be unhealthy. So we're trying to push that at Autoptic this time around. We got 1500 people through the door the first time around. We all did our best. We learned quite a bit from that first one. We're hoping to double that with this one.

SPURGEON: I read a bunch of interviews from various points of your career for this interview, Zak. The impulse going into Recidivist IV... was that a different creative impulse at work for you? Because past projects, the language is very much about pushing away from previous works, or pushing past certain ways of doing things or looking at things. And with this one, your language seems more about seizing on something that relates to the entirety of your work, that this is a piece very much in continuity with others you've done, or at least in a certain way it is. This project brings in everything. That might be total projection on my part. Was the impulse different?

SALLY: Yeah, very. [pause] Yeah. Very.

I think I had a come to Jesus moment with comics and what I do and how I do it. It was relatively brutal, which I'm sure doesn't surprise you at all. [Spurgeon laughs] I realized that... hm. I kind of realized that I'm fucking done. [pause] I'm done wondering where I do or don't fit into the world of comics as far as what people know about me, or don't know about me, or what success I've had or not had. Where I fit into the comics landscape or continuum. It was a little frightening and brutal, but I think I came out of it on the other end... feeling like I'm going to do exactly what I want to do and how I want to do it because that's what I'm best at.

I'm not even sure that what I do anymore fits within the world of comics. [laughs] And rather than be concerned about that, I think that means nobody out there is doing exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to be proud of it and do that as hard as I can.

SPURGEON: There's a fuck it element to the self-published Sammy, in particular, but it's oriented differently. That was about finding the kind of comics you want to do, that you felt you should be doing. A baseline. When you started talking about Recidivist IV, it seems like there's nothing there for you to push back against. It's untethered; there's no relationship to anything other than your own impulses from which you could push against. Is that a fair way to make that distinction?

I told a couple of people I was interviewing you, and they both wondered out loud if this wasn't a part of a cycle for you, that's you're constantly reinventing yourself. And I told them I thought this was different. It feels different, anyway.

SALLY: I hope I'm not repeating myself. I think I've ended up in a place, a very specific place, that wasn't on purpose. I was being led around by nose by my interests. I was involved with 'zines and I was involved with music, and that led me to buying a printing press. La Mano took me places in terms of making stuff by hand and what that means. To me... I always viewed them as separate. I did Sammy Vol. 1 printed on my own press just because of my peculiar trajectory through all this stuff. But in the act of it, it was really interesting in that it involved questions like if an artist is making the work, and then printing it, and publishing, going through all of the production stuff, that's interesting in terms of -- I don't want to sound high-faluting because I really was being led around by my nose -- how we think about a published book. We're used to published works looking a certain way because they're mass produced. And this was that, because that's the form it's taking. But there's a way this is thrown into question, because in this day and age if a mass-media object is made personally it's not not a print-maker's object... can we talk about that in different terms? In the end, Sammy was just a weird-looking book and I'm not sure people know what questions I was asking. So with this new Recidivist I decided to push those questions ten times as far.

That's really what the new Recidivist is about, and in some ways it's really interesting to me. Why we value these physical objects and people making stuff. What's the power of people making stuff that you and I and all of us value?

SPURGEON: There's a legacy with that in alt-comics. You conducted an interview last year with Peter Bagge, and he talked about encountering Robert Crumb's comics for the first time and being blown away by the obvious handcrafted nature of the creative end of it, right down to the hand-lettering. This allowed him a connection with the artist he didn't have with other comics-makers. The idea of a person doing the entire project, and connecting to it on that level. It seems that's something that's always engaged you. The last part, someone reading a work, is at the end of a continuum on which this art exists. It exists for you, and you're active in all of these ways, and then it finally goes to this reader. They bring their own meanings to it. And whereas past projects see you intrude on what used to be the middleman of mass production, now you're going even further to be more of a presence in that reading experience.

I wonder if this isn't something of a conflict for you. You seem wholly in awe that audiences have this relationship to the work, but you also seem like you're not entirely comfortable with the attention that comes to you as a result. There's a reluctance to provide of yourself through the art while at the same time you're compulsive about doing so.

SALLY: Do you feel that way with this one?

SPURGEON: Well... look. You wrote this amazing mini-essay, this statement, that's still on your site when you first offered this new issue for sale. And in that essay, you seem to be slamming the expectations that people bring to an engagement with art. But while that would ostensibly and logically free up the reader to a variety of different reactions, in a way this essay is also this absolute bid for a specific context for which you'd prefer this work to be read. It's a controlling issue, too. [Sally laughs] It's like you're making this argument for a very specific context while rejecting the idea of context. Exactly how comfortable are you with people bringing their own impulses into their relationships with your art?

SALLY: I... I have to go back and re-read that essay. [laughter]

For me with this book... I wonder if the way you were reading that -- or the way that I put it across -- was that with this new thing I really wanted to draw some lines in the sand. [sighs] Yeah, I am controlling the context of this new one. I want people to understand that this isn't like other books and it's not like other books for very specific reasons. There's a ton of intentionality behind why this book is this way. I am incredibly happy to engage with any and everyone that wants to engage the book on that level. I wanted to be very clear about what they're engaging with. It's like, "Either you're going to engage me..." I know in earlier times I was uncomfortable with that end result of that engagement, that one-to-one relationship. [slight pause] I'm not forming my thoughts correctly. It might have been that I was trying to split the difference between "I'm making this thing that I'm selling" and... there's a level of commerce and there's a level of personal engagement. The reticence might have from that. With this one it's like there's a personal level of engagment. If you're not into that, it's totally... fine. That's good. I'm happy we can say no. This isn't a normal book, therefore I'm not interested on that level. I wanted to say, "This is me, all the way down the line." And at the end of the line there's you and me and that's it.

SPURGEON: Do you have any sense of how people are reacting to it so far? Are you hearing back? Would not hearing back make you happy?

SALLY: I'm hearing back a little bit. The fun thing I'm going to do on the phone right now with you is to take this experiment a little further... I'm going to put the entire contents up for free next week.

SPURGEON: Oh, wow.

SALLY: I'll offer anyone who bought the thing and feels ripped off a 90 percent refund.

SPURGEON: Do you feel you can get close to the printed experience on-line?

SALLY: That's my point! [laughter] That's the thing I'm really interested in. There's a bunch of talk as to how I made this thing and why I made this thing, more than the content of the work. Which is totally fine. That's what this book is about, why you make something and what that means. But I don't want that to go into a closed loop of you having to pay $20 to experience the content. That kind of goes against my indie-guy thing. I think that's interesting... I want people to read it, and if you can do that for free... if that's what you want, that's cool with me. I think the content of the thing... the ideas are free but if you want the work... you know what I mean? The physical object I slaved over. I want that to be something that when you get it in the mail you think, "Holy shit." The care and attention that goes into making a physical object... the things I have like that, that I treasure as a piece of personal art, I absolutely treasure them. So I want to draw a distinction between the content and this thing. Which do you value?

SPURGEON: I think that's at the heart of a lot of how people are thinking about comics, now. You know, you used the word experience... is that another way to come at this book? There's an experience that you had in the work you put into it, there's that experience you have, but looking at myself and the people I know that I've read it, all of them talk about the immersive reading of it. It's not there as a vehicle to get across a certain number of story points, or an idea, as much as it's there for you to have those several minutes reading it. It is its own idea.

SALLY: Yes.

SPURGEON: So you're interested in both of those aspects, it sounds like. That seems new for you. I think of you in terms of these really strong narrative-based comics you've been doing. This seems a clean break with that. I wonder if that was always there, or if that's come up more recently.

SALLY: That again is the world leading me by my nose. For me it's been a slow process from 'zines til now, just because of the things I believe in, the DIY aesthetic and that whole thing of my wanting to make these things by hand. I don't know exactly why, but that's become important to me. When we talk about the comic shows... the way the world has changed since I was a kid is that now we have more of everything. We have more objects. We have more information. The object used to be the way you got the content, by necessity. That's the way you had to disseminate the information you wanted to get out there. That's no longer the case. Five years from now, that will be even less of the case. You know what I mean?

SPURGEON: Sure.

SALLY: With music, with comics and all of this stuff, what is that experience and what are the things that are specific to that experience that are important to us? There's a lot of awesome comics that I get right now. They're awesome, but I know exactly what they are when I get them. I don't want to say that's boring, but to me... to me there are so many questions brought up by the way the world is going. This new Recidivist is just me asking those questions of myself and of everybody else. I wanted to make an extremely fucked-up object. I didn't know what it was going to be, and I didn't want anyone picking it up to know what it was going to be. They and I were going to have to figure out what to do with this thing as I was making it and they were reading it. Hopefully that would be in a way that's worth our time. I wanted to make something you couldn't get any other way. This is the experience. When we were talking earlier about me trying to control the context -- I want to do that. I want to set something up where I can say, "This is a specific thing for a specific reason." I didn't want to spend any time talking about what it's not.

SPURGEON: Sure. [pause] Huh.

SALLY: [laughs]

SPURGEON: Let me ask you this. I really liked the images in this book. I thought it was the most visually arresting set of images I've ever seen from you.

SALLY: Oh. Thanks, man.

SPURGEON: One thing that strikes me about your career is that you have yet to give yourself the chance to settle into a place. You don't have the chops of a Jaime --

SALLY: What did you just say?

SPURGEON: That you don't have the natural ability of a Jaime Hernandez, let alone the refined natural ability of Jaime.

SALLY: God, I thought you said I did.

SPURGEON: No, I'm not insane. [Sally laughs] But I wonder if the way you work has been beneficial to marshalling the talents you have because you've never given yourself over to facile commercial considerations. Is there a virtue to constantly making yourself uncomfortable, Zak? [laughs] You say the world dictates these choices, but your strategy seems... it seems harder than most people's. Is that part of the point, though, to never let yourself settle into a groove for a considerable length of time? Is that how you see the responsibility of art, to not give yourself a break that way.

SALLY: I think that is the point of being artist. At least for me. I don't want go to far down the psychological road, but I do think I make things more difficult for myself, but I'm not going to rake myself over the coals for it. I think that I'm at the point in my life where rather than view that as a negative, I think it's really important. I think it's important for artists to do that. That's our job, right? To put ourselves into uncomfortable territory, to try things, to dig into something, whether or not they know it'll work.

Our conversation just now about the new Recidivist, even the earlier questions about PFC, it all sounds kind of academic and high-handed and conceptual. But it's not! For me these are really interesting questions, and questions that concern me on a daily basis. Why do we make art? What is its place now? What form should art take? How do people take it in? That's important to me. That's more important to me than whether or not people thought I did a good drawing or even if they thought what I did was successful on all levels.

For me, Sammy The Mouse is old comics. I feel comfortable doing what I'm doing there and how I'm doing it. I don't want there to be any confusion as to what people are taking in or how they're reading it. It's a comic book story. I don't think everything should be like that. I think there has to be a lot of spaces where people are working and asking questions of themselves and their art. What is this thing? Why does it exist? Why is it important? Why is it not important.

I don't know, that stuff is important to me. Not just comics, across everything I've ever done in my life. I can't believe the shit that's going on in music right now, the lack of creativity and figuring out how that works. Across the board.

SPURGEON: Do you see this same impulse in other cartoonists? Do you feel people agree with you on what seem to be pretty foundational matters? The ideas that you're offering in terms of the responsibility of being an artist, do you feel alone in the pursuit of those ideas?

SALLY: [pause] No. No. [slight pause, then emphatically] No.

This might refer to that break I had earlier. I don't really worry about that anymore. I'm fine with saying, "This is what I do." Either I'm going to quit or I'm going to figure out why it's important to me. I really think I figure it out. There are artists in all different sorts of fields that I feel are doing that. But that's also my point. When I said at the beginning I don't know where I fit in in comics anymore, I think that's fine. I'm totally fine with being a weirdo. You know? Everybody does what they do. This is what I do. If that's something you're interested in, that's awesome, I couldn't be happier to go in with you on that. Couldn't be happier. If it isn't your thing, that's fine, too.

The stakes are both too high and too low to concern myself with that shit anymore. The difference between the best-selling indie cartoonist and me is a few thousand books, and you're still not making a living. So why not do exactly what the fuck you want to do, exactly the way you want it to be done?

*****

* Recidivist IV, Zak Sally, La Mano, Mini-Comic Formatted Comic, 2014, $20 + $2.25 postage.
* Autoptic

*****

* photo provided by the cartoonist
* Autoptic logo art
* photos provided by the artist, including one startling image from the book itself and other photos of its creation; thanks, Zak

*****

*****
*****

posted 5:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Spawn Of Frankenstein

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Lisbon, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Paris, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Antwerp, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Cleveland, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 62nd Birthday, Keith Giffen!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 44th BIrthday, Johnny Ryan!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 57th Birthday, Brian Basset!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 53rd Birthday, Brian Pulido!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 64th Birthday, Chris Claremont!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 52nd Birthday, Ruben Bolling!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

FFF Results Post #402—Wild West Heroes

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Favorite Fictional Western Characters From The Comics." This is how they responded.

*****

David Robertson

1. Gus & His Gang
2. Jonah Hex
3. Lucky Luke
4. Saddle Tramp
5. Two-Gun Kid

*****

Tom Spurgeon

1. Mike Blueberry
2. Angel
3. Bill McGill
4. Clem
5. Bartholomew Aloysius Lash

*****

Matt Emery

1. Jonah Hex
2. Blackbow the Cheyenne (Swift)
3. Jeff Arnold (Riders of the Range - Eagle Comic)
4. Shorty Long Deputy Sheriff (The Australian Boy)
5. Tex Morton

*****

Marc Burkhardt

1. Bat Lash
2. Golden Age Ghost Rider
3. Jonah Hex
4. Firehair
5. Kid Colt, Outlaw

*****

Randy Clark

1. Jonah Hex
2. Bat Lash
3. Firehair
4. Pow Wow Smith
5. Ghost Rider

*****

Dylan Horrocks

1. Averell Dalton
2. Joe Dalton
3. Jack Dalton
4. William Dalton
5. Jolly Jumper

*****

Oliver Ristau

1. Ginny (Pretty Deadly)
2. Red Dust (Comanche)
3. Hipshot (Rick O' Shay)
4. Jonah Hex
5. Rawhide Kid

*****

Michael F. Russo

1. The Rawhide Kid
2. The Two Gun Kid
3. Jonah Hex
4. Arak, Son of Thunder (not technically â€œwesternâ€)
5. Scalphunter

*****

Tom Cherry

1. Bat Lash
2. Cinnamon
3. Angel
4. Hildegard Hamhocker
5. Quick Draw McGraw

*****

Sean Kleefeld

1. Tristan Macgregor
2. Scout
3. Daisy Kutter
4. Rio
5. Caleb Hammer

*****

Andrew Mansell

1. Hipshot
2. Casey Ruggles
3. Zorro
4. Little Joe
5. Clay Duncan of Boy's Ranch

*****

Philippe Leblanc

1- Lucky Luke
2- Buddy Longway
3- Crow (from East of West)
4- Yakari
5- Durango

*****

Alex Cox

1. Tex, especially the Kubert stuff, naturally
2. Lucky Luke
3. Missionary Man (2000 AD)
4. Saint of Killers
5. The old cowboy from when Walt Wallet and Skeezix went to a dude ranch

*****

Jones

1. Dust Devil (from Top 10; he seems like a real mensch)
2. Uncle Scrooge (in flashbacks)
3. Big Tex (Chris Ware's funniest strips?)
4. The Collector (the Toppi one, not the doofy, Avengers-kidnapping one)
5. Terra Man (original, Burt Reynolds version; accept no substitutes)

... bonus shout-out to the Texas Twister

*****

Buzz Dixon

1. Bat Lash
2. Lucky Luke
3. Tumbleweeds
4. Jonah Hex
5. the posse down at Boys' Ranch

*****

Bill Matheny

1) Limpid Lizard
2) Tumbleweed's Horse
3) Honkytonk Sue
4) Texas Twister
5) Hipshot

*****

Scott Dunbier

* Lance
* Tex
* Cisco Kid
* Blueberry
* Firehair

*****

Johnny Bacardi

1. Bat Lash, of course
2. Red Wolf
3. Bingbang Buster and his horse Hedy
4. Jonah Hex
5. Arizona Annie

*****
*****

posted 2:00 pm PST | Permalink

The Comics Reporter Video Parade

Tom Neely Inks

SAW Fundraising Video, 2015

Gerald Scarfe On TV

Cameron Stewart Interviewed At Lucca

Zen Pencils Profiled

How To Fold A T-Shirt, From TopatoCo

Jim Zub And Chip Zdarsky Pick Comics

posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink

CR Week In Review

The top comics-related news stories from November 22 to November 28, 2014:

1. More details emerge on police authorities in Malaysia seizing credit card records of those who bought Zunar's latest book. (It's just as awful as it sounds.)

2. Official selections at Angouleme are named. It strikes me that the four lists are really English-language origin heavy, but maybe that's just me. It's not like there's been a lack of North American, Canadian and UK creators over the last several years, so I'm probably wrong.

3. Digital Manga regroups after train wreck of over-ambitiou Tezuka-related crowd-funder with first in a series of planned smaller ones, with more immediate awards that get participants to print.

Winners Of The Week
The BDAngouleme.com selection winners; that has to be cool thing to hear you're getting.

Losers Of The Week
A tie between police authorities in Malaysia and the credit card company that turned their records over despite being informed by Zunar and his hired legal team they didn't have to.

Quote Of The Week
"There is no excuse for offensive or threatening behavior." -- David Glanzer, from Comic-Con International, on a San Diego area man presenting himself as a Comic-Con volunteer aggressively tweeting at comics pro in both offensive and borderline threatening ways following the decision in Ferguson, Missouri.

*****

comic image taken from a Marvel Comics comic book published during 1964, a strong year for Marvel

*****
*****

posted 12:00 am PST | Permalink

November 28, 2014

Go, Look: A Bunch Of Random Frazetta Imagery

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Paris, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Los Angeles, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Lisbon, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Los Angeles, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Charlotte, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Antwerp, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 45th Birthday, Greg Rucka!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 28th Birthday, Oli Smith!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 72nd Birthday, Maggie Thompson!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 27, 2014

Go, Read: Illustration Art Series Of Posts On The Art Of Richard Thompson

(1, 2, 3, 4, and potentially although not quite yet 5)

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Article On Zunar’s Customers Facing Potential Discovery Via Credit Card Records

There's a breezy but seems pretty straightforward article here about the basic surrounding one strange element of the latest police-led hassles facing cartoonist Zunar. The artist used a Malaysian pay portal to process credit card payments for a new book that has since come under fire. When police authorities asked for the records of those that bought the book, the company apparently went, "Uh... sure, okay" and forked them over. This article suggests the reasons why this might have happened and some of the potential consequences.

That whole mess strikes me as an ugly affair, and it's difficult to see the timing of Zunar finally winning in court from the 2010 series of fiascos and then a couple of weeks later enduring a new round of harassment and not make the easy mental connection between those two things. I wish Zunar an ultimately positive outcome, and while I know it's not in his nature to stop fighting I wish he didn't have to.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Paris, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Antwerp, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Space Heroes Portfolio

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Sean Gaffney on Ani-Imo Vol. 1. Randy Z. Ochoa on Just The Tips. Chris Sims on Ody-C #1. Glen Weldon on The Secret History Of Wonder Woman.

* psyched to hear I'll have something to do in Hartlepool that isn't visiting the Andy Capp statue. As always, best of luck to any new comics business owner.

* here's an article on the performance space aspects to Meltdown Comics, and how successful they've been. One thing I like about what they've done there is I don't know one person for whom this added element has changed how they describe Meltdown int terms of it being a comics shop -- this is appropriate, because it really hasn't changed a whole lot in the period of the time since this other element of their business has become successful.

* some nice person named Justin talks to Abigail Blackman.

* finally, it only set a record within its category (Hugo Pratt art), but almost a half-million dollars for a piece of art related to comics is nothing to sneeze at. And really, don't sneeze when there's a bunch of original art around.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 57th Birthday, Jerry Ordway!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 59th Birthday, Francois Boucq!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 60th Birthday, Dale Crain!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 61st Birthday, Mark A. Nelson!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 83rd Birthday, Tomi Ungerer!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 26, 2014

Happy Thanksgiving To Everyone In The US!

what Donald Duck teaches us is commitment

posted 6:00 pm PST | Permalink

Your 2015 Les Prix D’Angouleme Category Selections

The Angouleme Festival has announced its various category selections eligible for its prizes at the 2015 festival, beginning in late January. There are four categories: La Sélection officielle (books of the year), La Sélection Patrimoine (historical/archival), La Sélection Jeunesse (books aimed at young people), and La Sélection Polar (crime/detective).

There were a ton of artists familiar to North American English-language audiences on this list including Chris Ware, Gilbert Hernandez, Jillian Tamaki, Mariko Tamaki, Charles Burns, Joe Hill, Gabriel Rodriguez, Ed Brubaker, Michael Lark, Greg Rucka, Luke Pearson, Tom Gauld, Lynda Barry, Fiona Staples, Brian K. Vaughan, Neal Adams, Frank Miller, Dennis O'Neil and a ton more I'm likely missing because I only have eyes for Turkey today. That's not getting into French-language and manga artists with whom North Americans are familiar through translation. That makes for a very friendly to North American comics readers selections list in a year with a US festival president (Bill Watterson).

Congratulations to all those receiving this honor, and good luck in the final tally.

*****

La Sélection officielle

* L'arabe du futur Vol. 1, Riad Sattouf (Allary)
* Autel California: Face A- Treat me nice, Nine Antico (L'Association)
* Barthélémy: l'enfant sans age, Simon Roussin (Cornélius)
* Beta... Civilisations Vol. 1, Jens Harder (Actes Sud -- L'An 2)
* Blast Volume Four: Pourvu que les bouddhistes se trompent, Manu Larcenet (Dargaud)
* Building stories, Chris Ware (Delcourt)
* Calavera, Charles Burns (Cornélius)
* Cet été-là, Mariko Tamaki et Jillian Tamaki (Rue de Sèvres)
* Le chef de Nobunaga Vol. 4, Takurô Kajikawa et Mitsuru Nishimura (Komikku)
* L'enfer en bouteille, Suehiro Maruo (Casterman)
* Hommes à la mer, Riff Reb's (Soleil)
* Julio, Gilbert Hernandez (Atrabile)
* K.O à Tel-Aviv Vol. 2, Asaf Hanuka (Steinkis)
* Lastman Vol. 6, Balak, Mickaël Sanlaville et Bastien Vivès (Casterman)
* Little tulip, François Boucq et Jérôme Charyn (Le Lombard)
* Locke & Key Volume Six: Alpha et Oméga, Gabriel Rodriguez et Joe Hill (Milady)
* Love in vain, Mezzo et Jean-Michel Dupont (Glénat)
* Lune l'envers, Blutch (Dargaud)
* Magasin général Volume Nine: Notre-Dame-des-Lacs, Régis Loisel, Jean-Louis Tripp (Casterman)
* Max Winson Volume One: La tyrannie, Jérémie Moreau (Delcourt)
* Mes cent démons !, Lynda Barry (Çà et là )
* Moderne Olympia, Catherine Meurisse (Futuropolis -- Musée d'Orsay)
* Un océan d'amour, Grégory Panaccione et Wilfrid Lupano (Delcourt)
* L'or et le sang Volume Four: Khalil, Merwan, Fabien Bedouel, Maurin Defrance et Fabien Nury (Glénat)
* Panthère, Brecht Evens (Actes Sud BD)
* Que la bÃªte fleurisse, Donatien Mary (Cornélius)
* Saga Vol. 3, Fiona Staples et Brian K. Vaughan (Urban comics)
* Sukkwan island, Ugo Bienvenu (Denoël Graphic)
* Sunny Vol. 1, Taiyô Matsumoto (Kana)
* Ulysse, les chants du retour, Jean Harambat (Actes Sud BD)
* Vermines Volume One: Le retour de Pénélope, Guillaume Guerse et Marc Pichelin (Les Requins Marteaux)
* Les vieux fourneaux Volume One: Ceux qui restent, Paul Cauuet et Wilfrid Lupano (Dargaud)
* Voir des baleines, Javier de Isusi (Rackham)
* Vous Ãªtes tous jaloux de mon jetpack, Tom Gauld (éditions 2024)
* Yekini, le roi des arènes, Lisa Lugrin et Clément Xavier (éditions Flblb)

*****

La Sélection Patrimoine

* Pogo Vol. 1, Walt Kelly (Akileos)
* San Mao, le petit vagabond, Zhang Leping (Fei)
* Sandman Vol. 4, Neil Gaiman et Collectif (Urban Comics)
* Sex & Fury, Bonten Tarô (Le Lézard noir)
* Gilles la jungle, Claude Cloutier (La Pastèque)
* Green Lantern & Green Arrow, Neal Adams et Dennis O'Neil (Urban Comics)
* Histoire de la Sainte-Russie, Gustave Doré (Editions 2024)
* La malédiction de Rascar Capac Vol. 1, Hergé et Philippe Goddin (Casterman)
* Capitaine Albator Intégrale, Leiji Matsumoto (Kana)
* Daredevil par Frank Miller, Frank Miller, Klaus Janson (Panini)

*****

La Sélection Jeunesse

* Au pays des lignes, Victor Hussenot (La Joie de Lire)
* Boule à zéro, Volume Three: Docteur Zita, Ernst et Zidrou (Bamboo)
* Légendes de la garde, Volume Three: La hache noire, David Petersen (Gallimard)
* Passe-passe, Dawid et Delphine Cuveele (La Gouttière)
* Quatre sœurs, Volume Two: Hortense, Cati Baur et Malika Ferdjoukh (Rue de Sèvres)
* Les royaumes du Nord Vol. 1, Clément Oubrerie et Stéphane Melchior (Gallimard)
* Caterina, Volume One: Le gang des chevelus, Alessandro Tota (Dargaud)
* Emile et Margot, Volume Four: Merci les montres!, Olivier Deloy, Anne Didier et Olivier Muller (BD Kids -- Bayard)
* Hilda et le chien noir, Luke Pearson (Casterman)
* Karton, Volume One: Taméus Trognebarde, Uwe Heidschötter et Patrick Wirbeleit (BD Kids -- Bayard)
* Seven deadly sins Vol. 5, Nabaka Suzuki (Pika)
* Le temps des mitaines, Anne Montel et Loïc Clément (Didier Jeunesse)

*****

La Sélection Polar

* Fatale, Max Cabanes et Doug Headline (Dupuis)
* Gotham Central Vol. 1, Michael Lark, Ed Brubaker et Greg Rucka (Urban Comics)
* Moi, assassin, Keko et Antonio Altarriba (Denoël Graphic)
* Petites coupures à Shioguni, Florent Chavouet (Philippe Picquier)
* Wet Moon Vol. 1, Atsushi Kaneko (Casterman)

*****
*****

posted 5:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Dreadful Wind And Rain

posted 3:40 pm PST | Permalink

Festivals/By Request Extra: Geek OUT Reaches Goal

Despite having two avenues through which to approach the story, I did not figure out that there was a group organizing a crowd-funder to help fuel a "super queer comic con" in New York City next year until Brigid Alverson told me. Thank you, Brigid. I think that would be a fine and potentially quite successful addition to a suddenly heavy NYC convention landscape. If that sounds like something you could make use of as an attendee or an exhibitor, you might think about following the links provided and making a donation.

posted 3:35 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Very Chagrin Falls Thanksgiving

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: Digital Manga Shifts Gears After Tezuka World Failure; Want Funding For Ludwig B

After a big-failure with a massive, all-encompassing crowd-funder featuring a massive number of smaller, lesser-known Osamu Tezuka projects, Digital Manga has regrouped and announced a new strategy, project to project, with more modest goals. Here's the first one. More importantly perhaps, is that they have made a lower amount of money necessary to get actual physical copies of the books they're offering. They're off to a good start, and we'll see if it catches.

I don't have enough of a feel for crowd-funding to kind of declare this one free of the troubles that plagued their last one beyond those easy-to-spot elements. I'd be interested in someone recrunching the numbers, particularly in light of claims of institutional costs last time around that I have to imagine would still be there. There is still very much an outreach to the "cause" of having these books published, which I find typical of the vast majority of crowd-funders and believe is part of the basic appeal. I suspect this one, at least, will have a much better chance of succeeding. One cynic wrote me wondering if the timing of the move over the holiday weekend was meant in part to avoid easy scrutiny from vacationing writers, so there may still be some trust issues involved.

posted 3:29 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Frank Frazetta Came The Dawn Illustrations

posted 3:28 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read/Freely Download: Judenhass, By Dave Sim

posted 3:28 pm PST | Permalink

The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: Shows And Events

By Tom Spurgeon

* this lengthy Short Run report by Rob Kirby is worth pulling out of the Collective Memory link list and presenting in this column.

* there's not a whole lot left on the convention calendar -- next week is CALA, which I hope to attend -- but as was the case back in August there are some store signings, many tied into the holidays, that are likely of interest. I can't imagine living in Seattle and not wanting to see Robert Williams on behalf of the new collected Zap, for instance. Although they're not as large event to event as the convention and don't get the press relative to their influences, store signings have made a comeback from a time when they were only intermittently done. It's a much healthier landscape, too, because both the comics stores and the regular bookstores seem to have more than enough events made available to them, to the point where you're starting to get art galleries and performance spaces snapping up an appearance here and there.

* I have not heard back from Comic-Con on a question sent their way if they might extend their disassociation with this aggressive tweeter in terms of his volunteering with the show to an outright ban on attending the show. I'll let you know when I have an update. It's a brand new world. You know that I used to think that the day of on-line aggression and weirdness would burn itself out around 2003 or 2004, as the Lords Of The Basement (like me) that emerged in the mid-1990s finally got accustomed to the shock of not having their every opinion supported? Never have I been more wrong.

* finally, speaking of shows, performance venues and galleries, here's a show taking place over the next three days in a performance space/gallery. I found that one by accident, and I wonder if there aren't a number of smaller shows like this in the French-language or other European scenes right now. There seems to be shows of every size everywhere.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Bernie Wrighton Illustrating Frankenstein

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Bunch Of Barney Tobey Cartoons

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Tim O'Shea reports on the passing earlier this Fall of the talented artist André Coelho. He was 35.

* Brian Nicholson on Understanding Nicotine. Shaenon Garrity on Gen Manga. R. Fiore on recent works by Joe Sacco and Ted Rall. Sarah Boxer on The Secret History Of Wonder Woman. Marc Singer on Pax Americana. Ben Towle on a bunch of different books about comics.

* my favorite reaction from a cartoonist to the decision in Ferguson, Missouri was Warren Craghead's.

* go here to see video Jeff Newelt took of Dick Cavett and Al Jaffee talking cartooning in the back of a limo.

* Michel Fiffe Greyshirt pages.

* this flashed across my twitter in I think more than one tweet, but I could only find the one when I went back through my links -- Matt Hollingsworth presents Hawkeye issue color art without the line art. I liked looking at that.

* this show looks pretty great. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but it looks pretty great.

* Steve Sunu talks to Mike Richardson. Whit Taylor talks to the folks behind Dog City Press. Chris Arrant talks to Christopher Sebela. Matt Santori-Griffith talks to Bernard Chang.

* finally, I wish George Pratt visited my school.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 41st Birthday, Jonathan Rosenberg!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 52nd Birthday, Paul Guinan!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 56th Birthday, Karen Green!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 25, 2014

Go, Look: Disk-Eyes Dick

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

This Isn’t A Library: New And Notable Releases Into Comics’ Direct Market

*****

Here are the books that make an impression on me staring at this week's no-doubt largely accurate list of books shipping from Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. to comic book and hobby shops across North America.

I might not buy all of the works listed here. I might not buy any. You never know. I'd sure look at the following, though.

*****

AUG141848 ART OF RICHARD THOMPSON HC $35.00
SEP141875 ART OF THE SIMON AND KIRBY STUDIO $60.00
OCT141839 KIRBY KING OF THE COMICS HC NEW PTG (NOTE PRICE) $45.00
Three books that scream Christmas gift offerings, including a reprint of Mark Evanier's Kirby biography. I don't know anything about the Art Of The Simon And Kirby Studio book, but Abrams does a generally solid job with big books like that one and I'm literally interested in every last speck of information I can glean about Jack Kirby and his professional life, including his fruitful partnership with Joe Simon. That's not to say that Joe Simon isn't an interesting comics figure all on his own. But the shining light of this suite of book would have to be the Richard Thompson, part of the greatest year had by a cartoonist who is no longer working full-time. Thompson's story is becoming as interesting as his work, and the idea of this group of well-wishers and friends and peers gathering around him and getting the word about this quiet giant of cartooning in our midst is one I admire greatly.

JUL141449 INCREDIBLE CHANGE BOTS TWO POINT SOMETHING GN $19.95
Jeffrey Brown's books are a lot of fun, and he's a flat-out prolific cartoonist now. This is is homage series to a certain kind of genre entertainment, as opposed to the Star Wars work he's been doing where the Lucas people have tossed him the actual keys to some of the vehicles in that big garage.

JUL140133 MANARA BORGIAS HC (MR) $59.99
One thing we don't have when it comes to Milo Manara whenever he shows up in archival collections or in superhero comic book cover controversies is a sense of him as an artist right now. The work we see is either commercial one-offs or from much earlier in his artistic lifetime. It's like trying to figure out a film director based on a combination of his '60s movies and commercials he does for Audi. This is work from last decade, so it could be that window we're looking for into what the artist is like closer to the present. I don't know much about it other than that, but I sure as hell would open the book if that price tag didn't mean plastic.

JUL140142 SATOSHI KON OPUS TP $19.99
Although much better known as a filmmaker, the late director of Tokyo Godfathers and Paprika was a full-on manga artist for more than a decade. Opus I recall being a last work, mid-1990s, and not complete. I'm greatly looking forward to seeing it.

JUL140132 TALES OF IMPERFECT FUTURE HC $17.99
This is Alfonso Font, the Spanish illustrator that's about as versatile and solid as three dozen cartoonists of his generation better known to North American comics. I am never more fond of Dark Horse Comics than when they do a book like this one. I think these are short stories from a fruitful magazine period, connected by genre, but I'm going to buy it without looking.

SEP140080 ELFQUEST FINAL QUEST #6 $3.50
OCT140090 USAGI YOJIMBO SENSO #5 $3.99
SEP140729 LAZARUS #13 (MR) $3.50
SEP140533 ODYC #1 (MR) $3.99
SEP140749 SEX #18 (MR) $2.99
SEP140758 TREES #7 (MR) $2.99
AUG140454 TRANSFORMERS VS GI JOE #4 $3.99
SEP141515 STUMPTOWN V3 #3 $3.99
SEP140421 TMNT ONGOING #40 $3.99
Lots of genre comic-book comics, some I'd buy and some I'd probably think about buying before deciding not to. I haven't seen any of the new Elfquest work yet, so it's about time I tracked that down. I don't think I've even read a single review. I don't know if I've read a comic in that overall series since 1992 or so, and then it was intermittent, but that was a giant book for indie comics in the early 1980s and for a lot of us that read comics back then in the middle-school years. I'm glad they're wrapping it up the way they want to. Like that Elfquest series, Senso is also a "last" book but only in that it's set a bit ahead in the future of the narrative. I buy everything that Stan Sakai does. There's a fine group of strong-selling Image serial genre comics there, with the must-see of the foursome the Ody-C work from Matt Fraction and Christian Ward. The rest are books I'm more curious about seeing than convinced I'll pick them up. That's one of the GI Joe books on which Tom Scioli is working, and that sounds like fun. I liked previous iterations of the Stumptown series, so I'd like to see the new one. And the TMNT I looked up because I just interviewed Andrew Farago for his art book and was astonished to see that the new series was up to forty issues. It makes sense, though. I imagine there are a lot of pretty good comics-makers that would enjoy taking a shot at an issue or trade's worth of those comics.

AUG140513 NELVANA NORTHERN LIGHTS HC $39.99
JUL141223 NANCY COMPLETE DAILIES GN VOL 03 LOVES SLUGGO 1949-1951 $39.99
SEP140937 WOLVERINE BY AARON COMPLETE COLLECTION TP VOL 04 $34.99
Another bunch of gift-ready books; it's that season. The Nelvana book I believe to be an IDW printing of the Kickstarter-funded volume; I remember that deal being struck. I think that's valuable history, and IDW has been doing a fine job of taking on projects like this one and sprinkling them into their very effective licensed comics work. The Nancy books are beautiful, and that work is such that it will be pulled from shelves and re-examined years after other collections, ostensibly more exciting this very minute, have worked their way to the sales box. The Wolverine I'm just throwing in there because I like these Marvel projects that collected certain writer runs with certain characters -- it still doesn't make systematic sense how they do their collections, for one thing they could use a perennials program, but I bet this sorting principle makes for a reasonable cohesive, contained read, as much as that's possible anymore.

OCT141546 LITTLE NEMO DREAM ANOTHER DREAM HC PI
This is the big Locust Moon Little Nemo tribute project, phsyically large enough to make for a dozen funny Facebook photos of grown men looking like they've been shrunk to half-size while reading it. I think this kind of book is a perfect gift book, particularly if they do a good job of spotlighting the various artists involved in a way you might scramble to find other work. That couldn't have been an easy project to put together, either, so good for the publishing crew there and congratulations.

*****

The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.

To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.

The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.

If I failed to list your comic, that's because I hate you.

*****

*****
*****

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Bunch Of Cy Ferring Cartoons

posted 3:40 pm PST | Permalink

Things You Read On Facebook At Two O’Clock In The Morning

I can't find a link that isn't friends-only protected, but apparently Fantagraphics sent a box of kids-friendly material to the Ferguson, Missouri library. That's a nice thing to do and I hope other publishers might follow suit if that's something the library is looking to have done for them.

posted 3:35 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Robert Boyd Reviews A Bunch Of CAB Mini-Comics

Boyd was one of the first people to write regular criticism about handmade comics, so it's good to see him do a whole column like this

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: Campaign For Ed Siemienkowicz

There is a campaign for the cartoonist and illustrator Ed Siemienkowicz here trying to raise money on his behalf to assist him time- and resources-wise with his fight against cancer. I encourage you to check it out and consider giving if you're able, particularly if you're a fan of his work or consider Siemienkowicz a peer.

Someone e-mailed to remind me that Siemienkowicz has been an SPX exhibitor, and if you're not familiar with him through that show you can see examples of his work here.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portland, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Frank Frazetta Does Edgar Rice Burroughs

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* it makes sense that fans on the right-leaning side of the political spectrum would have complaints about some post-Ferguson decision statements made by various comics pros. As far as I know, none of these came close to cross the lines into abuse, forceful engagement or punishingly strident statements of the kind that got a former Comic-Con volunteer in trouble.

* Henry Chamberlain on Cats In Service. Jen Vaughn on Recidivist Vol. 4. Daniel McCloskey on You Can Did It. Ian Scheffler on Showa: 1944-1953.

* this cover always makes me laugh. Thirty years ago! Thirty years before that, Elvis hadn't come along yet.

* Andrew Yates talks to Leslie Stein. Chris Sims and Jordan D. White talk to Katie Skelly. Samuel Ferri talks to John Ficarra.

* Kieron Gillen writes something that a bunch of folks were thinking re: Warren Ellis and Moon Knight, I'm sure.

* congratulations to Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki on This One Summer making the Globe And Mail best books list. Congratulations to Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti on their Hansel and Gretel making a Kirkus Children's Books list.

* not comics: no idea there was a Patrick McDonnell play. I bet his comics would translate pretty well to stage with a skillful director involved.

* finally: the first Maakies.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 61st Birthday, Pat Broderick!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 36th Birthday, Max Clotfelter!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 64th Birthday, Doug Rice!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Sharon Sakai, RIP

Found on CBR via a release from Mike Richardson on behalf of the family. Sharon was the wife of cartoonist Stan Sakai, who made a personal announcement as to her passing on Facebook.

As noted in the CBR story, Sharon's medical costs had become a cause for comics professionals and fans throughout much of 2013 and 2014, proof of the affection with which many regarded both Sakais, together a loving and lovely presence at conventions and related comics gatherings for years upon years.

All condolences to Stan Sakai, the family, and Sharon's immense circle of friends, fans and admirers.

posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink

November 24, 2014

Go, Look: Thanksgiving

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

CCI Volunteer Tweets In Strident, Aggressive Fashion Post-Ferguson Verdict; CCI Cuts Ties

God bless Rich Johnston and his team at Bleeding Cool for assembling the mini-Twitter rampage of Bill Purcell, a self-identified Comic-Con committee member and I'm guessing longtime volunteer. He certainly seems to identify that way as well. Because of Bleeding Cool, I don't have to read this stuff any more than necessary. Purcell's run of tweets happened last night during the aftermath of the announcement made in Ferguson, Missouri, and address aspects of that case in a strident manner. He also directly engages with a few members of the comics community about those tweets, his right to make them, and various aspects to his life and personality he feels superior to those possessed by others on a different sort of life's journey.

I contacted David Glanzer at Comic-Con International about Purcell's tweets. His only statement so far: "This matter has been brought to our attention and we may be able to comment later in the day."

The whole thing sounds dumb, right? It is! But this is also an interesting thing. I agree with Mark Waid when he suggests here that calling for Purcell's position or volunteer job or whatever based on expressions of stomach-turning dumbassery isn't something that communities should do as a general rule. One hundred percent. But there's a growing element in comics culture that feels differently, and I think most institutions have to account for that in some way. I also think -- and Mark Waid anticipated me here, too -- there's a line to be drawn between staking out a position, no matter how loathsome or stupid, and engaging with your customer base in a way that carries even a hint of threat, or is simply so unpleasant and bothersome and noxious so as to disrupt and distract someone from the business of their day.

Hopefully, something will be done, even if it's just to engage with the fact the con would rather not get involved with an issue like that one. I expect this kind of thing to come up one or two times a year now, for everyone, and while I think I know what I'd do here, I'm not so confident I know which strategy is going to work best for every other institution over the long-term. Hopefully it's not just forgotten.

Update: The further statement from Comic-Con's David Glanzer, as promised, later on the same day.

"There is no excuse for offensive or threatening behavior. The fact that it comes from a purported member of our committee is clearly upsetting. Even though we cannot control what an individual says, we can address issues that have a direct effect on our organization or persons affiliated with our organization. We would also like to mention this individual no longer holds a volunteer position with our association. We encourage any individual who feels threatened by these comments or others to seek assistance from law enforcement."

posted 9:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Listen: Gil Roth Talks To Mary Fleener

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled Extra: Nobrow Announces Line-Up For Spring 2015

Tucker Stone at Nobrow sent along a the following list of books and comics that will make up the Spring 2015 season for their company. The comics part is something of a surprise; I can't remember them doing this many works in that format in a single season before; I barely remember any of the comics.

The announced works are:

*****

* The Spectators, Victor Hussenot, hardcover, 128 pages, April 2015.

Publisher's Description: What if we are merely shadows of our choices? If our characters are defined by simple inflections of light and chance? What if, instead of actors, we are mere spectators? Awash in subtle color, gently carrying the narrative and allowing readers to envelop themselves in the lyricism of the work, this 128 page graphic novel by one of Franceâ€™s hottest young cartoonists is a beautiful watercolor story that will demand as much attention as it will reward with its poetic and philosophical introspection of man. Reminiscent of French New Wave cinema with its clipped dialog, gentle pacing and departure from a classic narrative structure, The Spectators is a gorgeous, forward-looking example of what comics has become and what the artform can share.

*****

* Fantasy Sports, Sam Bosma, harcover, 56 pages, July 2015.

Publisher's Description: An oversized graphic novel expanding the Ignatz-award winning Fantasy Basketball to feature length and full color, Fantasy Sports tells the story of a young explorer and her musclebound friend on their trip treasure hunting in a mummyâ€™s tomb. Brooklynâ€™s own Sam Bosma blends the flavor of 1960â€™s sports manga with the boldness of a Mike Mignola line, and the hilarity begins when their bandaged adversary demands a game of hoops! With riches in the wings (and eternal entombment as possible consequence), it all comes down to one intrepid young woman and her slam dunk skills in this YA adventure.

*****

* 750 Years in Paris, Vincent Mahé, hardcover, 120 pages, August 2015.

Publisher's Description: War. Revolution. Architecture. Art. If you could stand still and just look for 750 years, what could you learn about the world? In August, it will be time to find out in this unique graphic novel that tells the story of one single Parisian building over the course of seven and a half centuries through all the upheavals of French history. Following his work in Nobrow 8: Hysteria, 750 Years in Paris finds Vincent Mahé grappling with the edges of communication that illustration allows in this hypnotic study of time and place.

*****

* Vacancy, Jen Lee, comic book, 24 pages, April 2015, $5.95.

Publisher's Description: Jen Lee (the cartooning powerhouse from an Idaho farmhouse responsible for the popular webcomic Thunderpaw) is coming to print for the relaunch of Nobrowâ€™s 17X23 single issue comic line. Now with a new, much lower price ($5.95), the 17X23 line that launched the careers of Luke Pearson (Hildafolk) and Rob Hunter (The New Ghost) will see five new releases in 2015, starting with Vacancy -- the story of a dog in a hoodie and glasses who might not be ready to live in the wild, no matter how much the post-apocalypse might need him to. A funny (and best of all, kind) take on Homeward Bound if all the animals were millennials and all the people were dead, Vacancy is the sort of comic that youâ€™d hand to someone who just woke up from a coma -- by they time they finished it, theyâ€™d be all caught up on what todayâ€™s culture gets right.

*****

* The Hunter, Joe Sparrow, comic book, 24 pages, May 2015, $5.95

Publisher's Description: The Hunter, the second release in the 17X23 line, sees Joe Sparrow taking a cue from Frozen and Super Nintendo with his 16-bit remix of a long, long time ago. In this acerbic fairy tale, one arrogant young hunter has grown tired of the simple bloodsport that occupies his friendless days. But when he hears of a mythical beast that sounds strangely like the animals heâ€™s already conquered, mania takes hold. Can our (anti) hero survive with his arrogance intact? There will be (video game style) blood!

*****

* Golemchik, William Exley, comic book, 24 pages, June 2015, $5.95

Publisher's Description: Abandoned by his friends, one young boy goes searching for fun -- and finds a golem on the hunt for the same, in this 17X23 comic by British cartoonist William Exley. But as the two go about living out their dreams of having the best summer ever, the boy realizes that golems donâ€™t know how to take it easy! To save his town, heâ€™ll have to get his new friend under control... or else everybody else in the neighborhood is going to do it for him!

*****

* Lost Property, Andy Poyiadgi, comic book, 24 pages, July 2015, $5.95.

Publisher's Description: From the pen of British cartoonist Andy Poyiadgi, Lost Property is the story of a young mailman named Gerald who comes across something pretty fantastic: a small shop, packed to the brim with everything in his life he has ever misplaced. From socks to yearbooks, this surreal repository of his life sends our confused friend into the maelstrom of memory, whisking him back through the crossroads that shaped his life. But what really matters, of course, is what he decides to do next!

*****

* Cyber Realm, Wren McDonald, comic book, 24 pages, August 2015, $5.95

Publisher's Description: Wren McDonald -- another Brooklynite, this one by way of Florida -- brings us the darkly hilarious story of a fatherâ€™s revenge in a cybernetic world of horror. In a dismal future ruled by a tyrannical nerd who has taken all technology for himself, one man is making his way through the type of trials that usually face a Liam Neeson kind of guy. But instead of relying on a gravely voice and guns, our protagonist enlists the help of whatever old piece of robotics he can attach to his sweaty torso, in the hopes of an earth-shattering, revenge-earning brawl.

*****
*****

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In St. Louis, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Frank Frazetta Memory Book

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* your great studio 360 doodle dare winner.

* Johanna Draper Carlson on Lady Killer #1. Keith Silva on Copra #18. Richard Bruton on Good Cop, Bad Cop and Tempo Lush Tales. Alex Hoffman on Benson's Cuckoos, Nothing Whatsoever All Out In The Open and Kinderbook. Matt D. Wilson on Batmanga.

* for the life of me I can't remember if I've linked to this Nate Powell interview in comics form or not.

* here's a profile of Mike Sterling and the opening of his new store. Nat Gertler was his first customer. I wish Mike Sterling the best in this endeavor. I'm always happy when a new comics shop opens up, and Sterling's a foundational comics blogger without whom I wouldn't be doing this.

* not comics: a couple of CR readers suggested this article about a band that self-financed their own tour and self-finances generally. I'm not sure there's a lot in there for comics people because the cultures are different. I'm sure that 80 percent of the cartoonists at SPX would snap up this general financial outlook in a second if it were there for them. Still, it's interesting when people talk about money.

* Dustin Harbin draws Sinestro.

* here are one writer's choices for gateway graphic novels. I'm more of a "crash the party at any point along the wall" guy, but I always have fun reading what other people think.

* finally, Fantagraphics has updated its "How To Read Love And Rockets" page. I think it does the job. The only thing I might advise a new reader is that with such a lengthy saga it might take longer than usual to make a full appraisal as to whether or not you like it and how much. I think I had read seven full issues in the first series before it finally hit me.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 67th Birthday, Jean-Pierre Dionnet!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 23, 2014

Go, Look: Ellen T. Crenshaw

posted 10:40 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled Extra: Uncivilized Announces Spring 2015 Line-Up

The well-regarded boutique publisher Uncivilized Books announced its Spring 2015 publishing slate earlier today via a press release distributed by marketing coordinator Alec Berry. The release notes that the company is still offering a subscription plan, and is also making their newly-announced books available for pre-orders on an individual basis (1, 2, 3.

The books announced are:

*****

* Borb, Jason Little, 9781941250020, $19.95.

Publisher's Description Of Project: Borb is a collection of connecting daily comic strips from cartoonist Jason Little. About a severely alcoholic homeless man, Littleâ€™s story draws upon the long and complex tradition of the comic strip slapstick vagabond, and, concurrently, depicts the real horrors specific to present-day urban homelessness. At once hilarious and horrifying, Borb challenges the reader with every panel.

Publisher's Description Of Creator: Jason Little was born in 1970 and raised in Binghamton, New York. He studied photography at Oberlin College, and now resides in Brooklyn with writer Myla Goldberg and their daughter Zelie Goldberg-Little. He has been drawing cartoons since he was a child. In addition to Shutterbug Follies and Motel Art Improvement Service, heâ€™s also written and illustrated the Xeric Award-winning Jack's Luck Runs Out, as well as a number of short works for various cartoon anthologies.

*****

* Robot Investigator, Vincent Stall, 9781941250044, $19.95

Publisher's Description Of Project: Robot Investigator follows a lonely robot to a mysterious planet, much like Earth, that it explores and questions. Both sweet and melancholy, itâ€™s arguably cartoonist and designer Vincent Stallâ€™s masterpiece, showcasing his constant interest in environment and texture through the eyes of something innocent. The book also includes a 16-page "Robot Parts" catalog designed by Stall.

Publisher's Description Of Creator: Vincent Stall is an artist, cartoonist and designer. Since 1999, he's run Puny, the renowned animation and design agency responsible for, among many other things, The Venture Brothers, and animated sequences on Yo Gabba Gabba!. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife and daughter.

*****

* True Swamp: Book 2, Jon Lewis, 9780988901490, $19.95

Publisher's Description Of Project: The best of Jon Lewisâ€™s seminal comic book series, True Swamp, collected for the first time! True Swamp: Book 2 continues the misadventures of Lenny the Frog, yet expands Lewisâ€™s strange vision of the swamp to include the likes of inventor marmots, sculptors of social interaction, collectors of human relics and the swampâ€™s one true religion. The stories collected here were awarded best of the year by Time Magazine in 2000.

Publisher's Description Of Creator: Jon Lewis began True Swamp in 1992. It continues today. Other cartoon works include Ghost Ship, Spectacles and Klagen. He's also written comics for DC, Dark Horse Comics and Kodansha. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the cartoonist Karen Sneider.

*****

It looks like a fine season, and I'm glad to see one of the more interesting publishers in comics grow into their seasons as they go along.

*****
*****

posted 10:35 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Joaquin Aldeguer

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Festivals Extra/Personal Announcement: Cartoon Crossroads Columbus

Hi. I'm taking a Festival Director position with Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC), a new comics show starting up in Columbus, Ohio. Here's the press release:

JEFF SMITH, LUCY CASWELL, VIJAYA IYER AND TOM SPURGEON ANNOUNCE NEW COMICS FESTIVAL: CARTOON CROSSROADS COLUMBUS (CXC)

Columbus, Ohio -- NOVEMBER 24, 2014 -- The Columbus, Ohio based Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) has announced its formation and intention to stage a four-day, yearly comics festival beginning in Fall 2016.

The group also announced the CXC Launch Event for October 2-3, 2015. The CXC Launch Event will be a two-day show split between the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum (October 2) and the Columbus Cultural Arts Center (October 3).

The October 3 portion of the event will be a one-day comics expo featuring up to 35 exhibitors.

The four-person Executive Committee for Cartoon Crossroads Columbus is:

* Lucy Caswell, Founder, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum
* Vijaya Iyer, President and Co-Publisher, Cartoon Books
* Jeff Smith, Award-Winning Cartoonist and Co-Publisher, Cartoon Books
* Tom Spurgeon, Editor and Co-Publisher, The Comics Reporter

Smith will further assume the title of President and Artistic Director. Spurgeon will serve as Festival Director, and will relocate to Columbus in early 2015.

"We're extremely excited to try and bring a first-class comics festival to Columbus, Ohio," said Jeff Smith. "I've attended and enjoyed so many great shows over the years, and hope that CXC can take its place alongside them."

"I share with the committee members a belief in the comics art form and a love for the American Midwest as a great place for comics," said Tom Spurgeon. "We also share a passion for the professional development and infrastructure issues facing so many cartoonists. We hope that CXC can become a positive force for a better community and more effective industry."

The group's organizational status, its advisory council members, its initial sponsorships, details on the 2015 Launch Event including exhibitor application information and initial plans for the 2016 Festival and beyond will be announced in early 2015.

A placeholder site can be found at cxcfestival.tumblr.com

A twitter account can be followed -- @cxcfestival

*****
*****

I'll leave off the usual contact information stuff.

I'll have a longer, directly personal post up about this soon, and what it means for CR. I wanted to hear back from people first.

I'm very excited for the opportunity, and hope that you'll make note of CXC's existence at this early stage.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Came The Dawn

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Totally Missed It: Roc Upchurch Dismissed From Rat Queens Following Domestic Violence Charge

I have to imagine everyone in the world had this news much closer to it happening last week, so my apologies both for not having it and for not being able to figure out who had it first.

According to a statement by writer Kurtis J. Wiebe, the artist Roc Upchurch will no longer be performing art duties on the Image book Rat Queens following an arrest on a domestic violence charge. That's a fun Image comic about a group of characters, all of whom are women, adventuring in the kind of fantasy world recognizable to just about anyone who's consumed genre media since 1980. It has a devoted fan base that has responded strongly to its humor, its depiction of friendship and the resulting displays of cooperative excellence. I believe the overall numbers have been solid to good; there has been expressed interest in an animated version and the series was nominated for an Eisner Award.

I have no idea at this time if Upchurch if this is simply a change in creative assignments or if any change in potential ownership status may occur. I used the word "divestment" on a first draft of this, and Stefano Guadiano reminded me via e-mail that that's a hideous choice of words because of the implication of force and the fact you simply can't divest people of ownership of things as a basic human rights issue. What I meant is I don't know if Upchurch is involved as a part-owner -- I'm told he is, but I haven't confirmed -- and if that status could change due to something additionally being worked out.

Our hearts go out to the victim and any loved ones involved. We wish them a just outcome and as much support as is possible in getting there. This is a welcome example of a frequently silent crime not being silent, but it's still a crime and only becomes news with personal cost added to the already significant amount of harm arising from the act itself.

Issues surrounding domestic violence can be difficult to process in a hundred different ways. There has been such a systemic failure by the culture and the institutions of the culture in regards to certains kinds of crimes and awful behavior that we must now not only find what's right in the circumstances facing us but do so while keeping an eye on the forces and beliefs that have hindered just outcomes in the past. It's necessary work, though. I think we'll get better at this in the months and years ahead, and one hopes for all the speed and care in the world in getting us to a moment where best possible outcomes becomes an aspirational concept rather than an ameliorative one.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Hawkeye Collage

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: Johanna Draper Carlson On The Collapse Of Digital Manga’s Osamu Tezuka Kickstarter

Johanna Draper Carlson is the writer about comics that most regularly expresses concerns about elements of the comics business from the standpoint of the consumer, so I was interested in reading her summarization of Digital Manga's failure to launch an exceedingly ambitious crowd-funder on behalf of several minor Osamu Tezuka manga licenses.

While it's fascinating to me to muse over the timing of the initial objections to the crowd-funder and how they might have interrupted and then beat down any chance that campaign had to build momentum -- I've always thought a lot of these campaigns are fragile that way -- it's also good to have Draper Carlson remind us that on a fundamental level, just coming in cold off the street at any time during that campaign's run, one might raise objections. She further trashes the responses from the company as not helpful and bad PR.

This whole thing feels a bit more significant to me than usual because of the refinement of the criticial backlash. Sometimes crowd-funding campaigns avoid criticism they might otherwise receive because of the idea that criticizing elements of a crowd-funding campaign is an attack on those that choose to support the thing you're criticizing. That is a tricky gumbo of issues to negotiate, but I think once one campaign is scrutinized the way this one was that this will make it easier for subsequent campaigns to be challenged in their assumptions and strategies.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Prof. Jogg’s Travelogs

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Comics By Request: People, Places In Need Of Funding

By Tom Spurgeon

* a young professor is looking for help in financing a book about Walt Kelly.

* not comics: this project was brought to our attention by that great comics-maker Phoebe Gloeckner, whose sister's classroom this is.

* a couple of heavy-hitters have projects hurtling towards their initial goal: C. Spike Trotman, for a sequel to Poorcraft emphasizing budget travel; Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, the writing team that's starting to make a habit of well-supported crowdfunders, for a new graphic novel.

* I don't know the creators on this project, but it popped up on the top of my looked-at projects over there for some reason, and seems stylish.

* finally, I believe this Dylan Meconis Patreon is reasonably new. Meconis is prolific and well-liked, and thus seems well-suited to such a campaign.

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Erika Lavin

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Indianapolis Star Alters Than Deletes Gary Varvel Cartoon

A Gary Varvel cartoon uploaded Friday that criticized the decision of President Obama to halt the deportation of several thousand immigrants was first altered, then deleted by the Indianapolis Star. A bunch of the on-line site that traffic in this kind of story as a main thing had articles on it over the weekend. Here's one. It includes both cartoons.

It's a news story, too, though, for sure. I would suggest it's the alteration that makes this a more interesting than usual story, as the decision was made to eliminate the apparently race-signifying mustache of the man climbing through the window with his family to join a family sitting down for Thanksgiving fare. It's hard to track whether or not the renewed objection was to the clumsiness of that move or to simply point out that the objected-to racism and general upset with the cartoons was more than an element of the surface depiction involved. It's probably both, and I'd lean towards the latter. No matter what you think about the policies involved, it's hard to engage with a depiction of those at the heart of the executive order being clownish freeloaders except in an abstract way that a cartoon fairly voids. In addition, I think that the Thanksgiving table is such a strong, iconic image of inclusiveness, good fortune shared and charity even for those who rarely think on those terms I would imagine that many would find denying anyone a place at the table as a markedly awful thing.

Making editorial cartoons on a regular basis is a really rough gig. Varvel's cartoon is a reminder that it's not just the changing political context in terms of what we stomach and allow as discourse that make it a tough assignment -- sometimes it's hard to articulate an opinion, and that's before it has to be drawn for others. All on a deadline, too.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Lawrence, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Alex Toth In Plop! #11

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* more Alex Toth letters discovered is always good news.

* Paul Gravett talks to Max.

* Bob Temuka looks at different sections of his comic shop and writes about negotiating the wall of covers that is a primary venue for new comics sales. I find those walls of comics absolutely headache-inducing at this point, and I really have to settle in and focus to buy comics that way. I also usually forget stuff when I go to the comic book store, but I don't know if that's the wall or just me.

* Todd Klein continues his series on digital lettering (4, 5, 6, 7).

* Rob Clough on the comics of Wade Simpson and the comics of Laurel Holden. John Kane on a bunch of different comics. J. Caleb Mozzocco on Ms. Marvel Vol. 1, Teen Titans Earth One Volume One and a bunch of different comics. Sean Gaffney on Lucifer And The Biscuit Hammer Vols. 1-2. Michael Buntag on Cosplayers #1-2. Richard Bruton on Age Of License and The Grinning Mask. Joe Gordon on 100 Bullets Book One. Alex Hoffman on Mutiny Bay.

* finally, Kelly Thompson suggests an array of comics that can be had for less than $50 a month.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 56th Birthday, Tony Fitzpatrick!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 22, 2014

CR Sunday Interview: Andrew Farago

*****

I've known Andrew Farago for several years now, long enough I can't remember exactly when we met. He's Curator at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, and has authored a variety of comics, ranging from self-directed mini-comics/webcomics series to gigs at Marvel. Farago is also an effective writer about comics, so when I saw he was the author of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual Guide I perked up a bit. I think there's a lot of nuts and bolts history being put down in books like this one, which is very elaborately designed and presents to its readers page after page of scans and recreations of objects in the history of the unlikely worldwide comics and licensing hit. I think these books are even more likely to be valuable when someone with the access and doggedness of Farago is providing copy.

The longtime, still-ongoing success of a comic that was at best in my personal top 200 of brand-new series purchased as a comics fan that decade is something that's always baffled me. I thought Farago's book was very sweet in the way it chose to make itself the unlikely story of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird over a version that might have favored the licensing agents and animation producers that took the Turtles from substantial comics profits to immense real-world, pop-culture impact. The Eastman/Laird story has been a remarkable one, and while in many ways what happened is so very different from what might happen now there are similarities in a number of self-directed page to screen to toy projects of varying magnitudes. I thought I'd take this opportunity to ask Farago all my Turtles questions and maybe by doing so get at one or two of those broader issues. I'm grateful he humored me. I tweaked a bit for flow. -- Tom Spurgeon

*****

TOM SPURGEON: I suppose this is a pretty standard question with which to begin things, but do you have a personal history with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Can you describe your personal awareness of and fondness for those comics, those characters?

ANDREW FARAGO: Like millions of other kids who grew up in the 1980s, I learned about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when the first animated mini-series aired in syndication. It was right around Christmas break in 1987, and my younger brother and I were hooked as soon as we saw the first commercials advertising the mini-series. We watched every re-airing of that first series, then the regular series, and again, like millions of other kids, we begged our mom for every single TMNT product we could get.

I scored the second print of the fourth issue at a flea market sometime that year, and was blown away at how much different the Eastman/ Laird comics were from the TV show. Blood, swearing, gritty artwork... I bought a few more early issues around that time, but the television series was more my speed at 12 years old.

I still have the Turtles action figures we got for Christmas '88, although most of the other stuff we couldn't live without at the time got tossed out over the years.

We went crazy for the first live action movie when it hit in 1990, and again, like millions of other kids, I moved on to other things after the second movie hit. Apart from catching the second animated series on TV every once in a while and revisiting the Eastman/Laird comics, I didn't pay much attention to them for a long time after that.

SPURGEON: What about your past, this past as a fan and then, suddenly, not one, made this an easier book for you to write? What made it harder?

FARAGO: Obviously I'm biased here, but I think being a lapsed fan was a big help. I have a real fondness for the source material, but being away from it for a period of time gave me just the right amount of distance. Thankfully I'd been a fan during the most prolific period for TV, movies, comics and merchandise, so catching up wasn't quite as daunting as it could have been.

If I hadn't been such a fan in the late '80s, I don't think I'd have committed myself to two years' worth of research and writing. Although if I'd kept up on the Turtles, I could have saved myself months of research and a lot of money at comic conventions.

SPURGEON: [laughs] How was the project presented to you? Were you the primary choice?

FARAGO: Chris Prince, editor at Insight Editions, sent me an e-mail letting me know that they'd gotten the license from Nickelodeon to do a big TMNT history book, and he invited me to send a pitch for a 200-page book. I told him that I'd start with the Eastman and Laird comic, then would follow the property through all of its various incarnations all the way through the latest versions from Nickelodeon, which bought the entire property from Peter Laird in 2009.

I think that a half-dozen writers pitched for this one, but my day job at the Cartoon Art Museum gave me a leg up, since that gives me a lot of access to creative talent and the art collectors who would be providing a lot of the book's imagery. One collector I've worked with a lot over the years owns the complete first issue of TMNT, and he let us scan every single page of it for the book. None of the other potential writers would have had access to materials like that.

SPURGEON: Were Kevin and Peter involved from the get-go?

FARAGO: Kevin and Peter were on board immediately, although Insight Editions was only able to set me up with Nickelodeon, officially. I had to track Kevin and Peter down on my own, along with all of the other writers, artists, voice actors, animators, puppeteers, rappers, and other creative talent I interviewed for the book.

SPURGEON: Huh.

FARAGO: I spent about two hours on the phone with Kevin midway through my research, and Peter and I traded e-mails for about six months, with him answering every last TMNT question I had in painstaking detail. Getting their full cooperation was an essential part of the book, and I'm incredibly grateful for the help they provided every step of the way.

SPURGEON: Were there restrictions or imperatives that directed the content?

FARAGO: There were almost no restrictions on the book, which was a huge relief compared to some of the corporate-owned properties I've worked on. Nickelodeon had to sign off on everything, and I think their only editorial input came in the chapter about the current Nickelodeon cartoon series, and even that was just clarifying some people's official job titles.

But now that I mention Nickelodeon, I remembered the book's biggest obstacle, which was that so much of the latest live-action movie was completely under wraps, and a lot of it was being reworked as we were going to press. That chapter's a little more vague than I'd have liked, and some of it was factually inaccurate by the time the movie was released. I was able to make adjustments to that chapter with the book's second printing.

SPURGEON: Where does a book like this fit into the wide spectrum of material aimed at Ninja Turtle fans? I have no knowledge of that fandom beyond assuming there is one. Is there a lot of material with this basic level of sophistication that is also fan-oriented?

FARAGO: As someone who's been a dedicated comics fan for most of his life, I don't think I've encountered anything quite like TMNT fandom. There are a number of really dedicated fansites online, weekly podcasts and YouTube shows, review sites, collector groups, fan clubs, meetup groups... so many people who just live and breathe Turtles every day. Two guys who live right in my neighborhood have TMNT tattoos, and every time I see them, they're wearing some piece of Turtles gear I've never seen before. [Spurgeon laughs]

A one-off book can't match that level of intensity or scope, although I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from the really hardcore fans who follow all of the dedicated TMNT sites, and my goal -- and my editor's -- was always to make something that would be accessible to any casual fan of the Turtles. A TMNT blog can run an unedited 10,000-word interview with a storyboard artist, but you're working toward a much different goal with a coffee table book.

For sheer attention to detail, it's hard to top Peter Laird's blog, which has been updating regularly for more than a decade with really detailed stories about his tenure on the TMNT comics and the 2003-07 animated series that he produced.

SPURGEON: What were a couple of the bigger questions you had going in? What curiosity did you see satisfied?

FARAGO: I was really curious about Eastman and Laird, and tried to make the book as much as possible about their story. I don't know if I believe in Fate, but if these two hadn't lived near each other, didn't have the right mutual contacts, hadn't both grown up on Jack Kirby comics, hadn't hit it off in person, hadn't spent a slow night at their studio drawing turtles with weapons, hadn't come up with a catchy name for those turtles, hadn't decided to try their hand at making a comic book, hadn't self-published and retained all of the rights to their characters, hadn't sent out a press release that the Associated Press picked up... If any of those things had played out just a little differently, I'd have spent the last two years writing about Car Wars, the other property that Mark Freedman of Surge Licensing tried to land the same time he was talking to Eastman and Laird.

The Turtles reached some dizzying heights, but they also hit some real low points in the mid-to-late nineties, and I wanted to get the inside story on that, too, including Peter and Kevin's working relationship. A lot's going to change from the time you're a broke twenty-something artist and when you find yourself running a massive production company that oversees merchandising, films, animation, and publishing.

Over the course of dozens of interviews, I kept waiting to see if anyone had anything bad to say about Kevin or Peter, but it was just one nice thing after another. They seem to have been very generous employers, and were glad to share the wealth during the boom years.

SPURGEON: What was the shape of the archives you had to work with? How much of what you did was tracking down certain things and where did you have to fill in the blanks a bit? Were there particular research challenges here?

FARAGO: Fortunately, a lot of key Turtles material, especially the Eastman/Laird comics run, was coming back into print as I was starting my research. IDW picked up that license after Nickelodeon bought the Turtles, and they've been steadily making a lot of otherwise hard-to-find material available. I had to pick at subsequent volumes of the comics bit by bit, but thankfully Erik Larsen was able to lend me the complete run of the Turtles' Image Comics series. I look forward to doing a complete cover-to-cover readthrough on anything I missed as IDW completes their TMNT library.

All of the theatrical releases are available on DVD, as are all of the cartoons, and the infamous and long-out-of-print Coming Out of Their Shells tour is on YouTube, so I was able to at least watch a nice representative sample of everything during my research. I've still got a working Nintendo Entertainment System at home, too, and playing 20-year-old video games was a fun way to unwind after hours of reading.

SPURGEON: Was there stuff specific to the comics history end of things you wish you could have gotten into but didn't because of the interests of the perceived audience?

FARAGO: The book's final word count was in the neighborhood of 40,000 words, and my full manuscript was about 25% longer than that. In order to cover all of the things that were happening with the property simultaneously, I sometimes had to truncate the comics coverage in order to focus on other media. If I could have about eight additional pages in the book, I'd have spent more time talking about the second and fourth volumes of the comics, when Jim Lawson and Peter Laird were guiding things. I'm hoping to carve out some time soon to do additional interviews with Jim and Peter so that I can run a "lost chapter" online.

Two other bits were left on the cutting room floor, and maybe I'll post those online someday, too. First was a big cross-country motorcycle trip that Peter and several members of Mirage Studios took from Massachusetts to the San Diego Comic-Con and back in the summer of 1991. Everyone on the trip had really great stories to tell about it, and I'm hoping that Peter or Ken Mitchroney or one of the other Mirage alums will do a comic book adaptation of it someday.

I had a full chapter's worth of material on the Creator's Bill of Rights and the importance of creator ownership and artistic control over your properties, with nice insights from people like Scott McCloud, but we only had so many pages in the book, and it didn't quite fit the overall narrative. I at least managed to make a mention or two of Peter Laird's Xeric Foundation Grant and its importance to self-publishers.

I could have spent a lot more time talking about the black-and-white publishing boom of the 1980s, but had to settle for making sure that I fit Dave Sim and Wendy and Richard Pini into the book. There was probably another full chapter to be had on the dual influences of Jack Kirby and Frank Miller on Eastman and Laird.

And Tundra! Can't forget about that. I'd have loved an entire chapter on Tundra and The Words and Pictures Museum and all of the fun stuff Kevin Eastman did during the Turtles' biggest years. Every cartoonist I know swears that if he had millions of dollars, he'd start a publishing house and give all of his buddies all the money they needed so that they could focus on making comics without having any financial worries or editorial interference. And Kevin Eastman actually did that, and it was a wonderful, amazing, chaotic mess. A few all-time great comics came out of it, at least. Thank Kevin Eastman the next time you read From Hell or pull a copy of Understanding Comics off your bookshelf.

SPURGEON: So why do you think that one hit? I was one of the older kids (15) that bought the title cold from a comic book shelf, and I liked it fine, and I bought some issues, but I was never over the moon for it and certainly when it refigured itself to skew younger for other media I had no interest in that beyond the novelty of the background story, that I knew it was these two guys that were managing the enterprise. But the content itself... those first fans, what do you think those first fans responded to?

FARAGO: Those first comics by Eastman and Laird were really fun, and there's an energy and enthusiasm to them that makes you gloss right over any number of technical issues with their work. Frank Miller wasn't drawing a monthly Daredevil comic anymore, Jack Kirby was only doing the occasional book for publishers like Pacific Comics... doing an adventure comic with an underground sensibility during an era when most mainstream comics were trying their best to look like John Byrne's Fantastic Four certainly helped their book to stand out, and the black-and-white art with the duo-tone shading really gave the book a distinctive look.

But bringing Fate back into this, if they hadn't come up with that perfect title, Eastman and Laird might still have boxes full of that first issue sitting in their respective garages. The same comic called "Turtle Warriors" or "Mutant Turtles" might have done okay, but something about that four-word combination put it over the top. That title is what got the Associated Press to pick up the story about the publication of their first comic, which helped them to sell out their first printing immediately, which led to an immediately sold-out second printing, which got them thinking about doing a second issue and becoming full-time comic book artists. The same book without that title? Who knows?

And if TMNT didn't hit, you didn't get the black-and-white boom, with every publisher hoping to create the next TMNT.

SPURGEON: And without the boom no bust, and a potentially completely different 1990s... Hm. So why even as the context changed for it did the Turtles continue to work, Andrew? Was it just weird enough to be an effective courier for these pretty standard little kid adventure tropes? Was it the fighting? The brotherly friendships? Cartoon or comic book, what is in a successful TMNT story, one that works?

FARAGO: At least since Star Wars, and probably before that, there always has to be a "biggest thing" for kids at any given time. Star Wars gave way to He-Man, and that gave way to G.I. Joe and Transformers, and TMNT jumped in there just as those were starting to fade. The core Eastman and Laird concept is a lot of fun, and you can explain it really quickly -- mutant turtles living in the sewer, and a rat trained them to be ninjas, so that they can fight other mutants and ninjas.

This is where all of those perfect decisions from Eastman and Laird came into play again. They and Mark Freedman threw in with Fred Wolf, who'd produced the hugely successful DuckTales cartoon for Disney, which coincidentally starred three identical brothers who were identical except for the color of their clothing. Wolf hired David Wise, who'd already been a regular reader of the TMNT comic book, and who had written a lot of action/comedy/merchandise-driven cartoons already. They figured out which elements of the comic book would resonate with kids, amped up the Turtles' personalities, added pizza and some recurring bad guys into the mix, and it all seems like a no-brainer now.

The theme song, co-written by Big Bang Theory creator Chuck Lorre and his writing partner Dennis Challen Brown, was another thing that instantly hooked kids. And just like with Star Wars, the merchandise roll-out was kind of slow, and somehow the timing worked out perfectly. The TMNT action figures blew off the shelves as soon as they hit stores.

SPURGEON: The timeline seems extraordinarily compressed in terms of going from the comics to the animated TV show and licensing bonanza. Was that atypical for a licensing-heavy cartoon property?

FARAGO: It was a real whirlwind for Eastman and Laird. When they met Mark Freedman, who took on licensing for them, they gave him a month to come shop the Turtles around and if they liked the progress he'd made, they'd keep working with him. He got Playmates on board for the toy license right away, and given the success of properties like G.I. Joe and He-Man, they wisely suggested launching the Turtles on television before rolling out the toy line.

The first comic book was published in the spring of 1984, Freedman came into the picture a couple of years later, and the year after that, the first cartoon was airing on television. By comparison, when Nickelodeon bought the Turtles from Peter Laird in 2009, it took them three years before they started airing their Turtles cartoon and launching their action figure line and merchandising. Angry Birds has been a huge property for almost five years now, and they're aiming for 2016 for a theatrical release, and the big studio superhero movies have staked out another six years' worth of release dates. The first wave of TMNT stuff was really Eastman and Laird flying by the seat of their pants by comparison.

Do I have to say "their respective pants" there? They weren't rich yet, but they had their own pairs of pants.

SPURGEON: Very different pants, too, I'd gather. What's worth revisiting in terms of the later comics, do you think? I'm kind of fascinated by Jim Lawson as a cartoonist, for instance, but I don't know how much work he did on those actual comics, or when he did so.

FARAGO: I love Jim Lawson's art, and feel that he's really underrated. Even in my book, unfortunately, since I didn't get to spend nearly enough time talking about the fact that he was actually the most prolific of the TMNT artists, and had a big influence on the Turtles comic books that Mirage published over the years. He joined Mirage early on, with Steve Lavigne and Ryan Brown, assisting Kevin and Peter together, then assisting them individually when they started alternating issues in an effort to keep the book on schedule, then taking on more and more of the art chores as Kevin and Peter's responsibilities to the rest of the TMNT franchise grew. The black-and-white comic book might have wrapped up a lot earlier if not for that core group.

IDW's working their way through the whole Turtles back catalog. My favorites are still the Eastman/Laird collaborations, especially the first 11 issues of the Mirage comic and the four one-shots they did spotlighting the individual turtles. The rest of that first volume is available as full-color trade paperbacks from IDW, and it's a really mixed bag. Lots of one-off stories about the Turtles meeting strange characters and aliens, the Turtles dropping into fantasy settings, really throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. I'm glad that they were so willing to experiment and let other indie cartoonists cut loose on the Turtles, though. Mark Martin, Richard Corben, Mark Bode... not everything worked, but it was interesting to see them going so far from the mass-media version of the Turtles.

My recommended reading list if you're just starting out would be to read the very first issue from 1984, and if you like that, keep going with the big TMNT: Ultimate Collection hardcovers from IDW. IDW's current comic series is a fun mix of the original comics and other versions that have come along since. Try the Change Is Constant trade paperback that kicks off the new run, or maybe the Northampton trade that Ross Campbell illustrated.

SPURGEON: How much do you think Peter and Kevin were creatures of comics culture and how much were they kind of outside their direct peer group? I would think the control they desired and tried to have was very indicative of 1980s comics-making, as well as their belief in their one big hit.

FARAGO: It's interesting, since their entry into comics was really unlike anyone else's, before or since. Their first convention appearance was to promote TMNT #1 and to sell their mini-comic, Gobbledygook, and thanks to advance press, they went into that show knowing that they'd sold through their whole print run of the Turtles comic. But during those years when they were "just" comic book creators, they struck up a lot of friendships with other indie artists, trading comics through the mail, hiring some of those artists to join Mirage Studios or as freelancers on the comic, and a lot of those guys are still friends with Kevin and Peter today. The aforementioned artists who formed the core of Mirage, artists like Stan Sakai, Ken Mitchroney, and Dave Garcia.

Kevin and Peter deserve a lot of credit for trying to cut their fellow artists into the Turtles money whenever they could. Usagi Yojimbo's appearance on the Turtles cartoon and as an action figure brought Stan Sakai's characters in front of an audience that was thousands of times larger than the number of people visiting Direct Market comic shops and conventions.

As far as creative control goes, those two are the textbook example of why artists always need to read their contracts closely, and why you shouldn't sign away ownership or creative control unless you really know what you're getting into. They had any number of opportunities to cash out after that first issue hit, and they could have easily said, "We've sold a lot of comic books, but how far could this thing really go?" But they didn't, thankfully, and I think we're well into our second generation of artists who holds them up as an example of the importance of creator ownership.

They'll both acknowledge that if people like Wendy and Richard Pini and Dave Sim hadn't paved the way, they might not have considered self-publishing to be a viable option. Which is one of those things I love about comics history. If these two hadn't been fans of Jack Kirby's DC books in the '70s, if they hadn't moved on to Frank Miller's comics in the late '70s and early '80s, if Cerebus and ElfQuest hadn't earned a living wage for their creators... it's fun to see how all of these disparate elements come together.

SPURGEON: I'm surprised that the Turtles are still around, with as much force as they have -- can you point to one or two creative decisions Peter or other folks made later on, say the 2000s, that have helped keep that whole franchise a living, breathing thing?

FARAGO: When Eastman and Laird signed their TV and toy contracts, Mark Freedman warned them that they'd probably get about two good years out of it before their toys were in the discount bins and they faded into the background. Although that wasn't the case, the peak years couldn't last forever, and by the mid-'90s, the franchise was losing steam. The first live action movie was a blockbuster, the second did pretty well, but the third didn't come anywhere close to generating the excitement the first film had.

SPURGEON: I took some kids to that third film. It was an empty theater except for us and maybe one other guy, and it seemed like the party was over.

FARAGO: The TV cartoon tried to reinvent itself a couple of times, but its target audience had moved on to the next big thing, which was the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The whole comic book industry was imploding at the time, which led to the cancellation of the Archie Comics kid-friendly Turtles comic, and the edgier black and white TMNT comics weren't finding an audience, either. I think the property was seen as too much of a kid thing by comic shop customers, while kids didn't want the more adult version that didn't look like the TV show.

All of this came to a head with a live-action show called The Next Mutation, which was actually produced by the same people who were in charge of the Power Rangers. The short version of it is that the producers insisted on including a female Turtle as part of the team, and Eastman basically agreed to it so that they could keep as many people employed at Mirage as possible. Ratings weren't great, fans hated the show, and Eastman and Laird's relationship was at its most strained, since they'd been on opposite ends of the female turtle argument.

After letting the franchise rest for a bit, apart from Laird and Lawson's TMNT comic and some merchandising, Laird and Mirage signed on as executive producers for a new Turtles animated series that was much closer in tone to the original comic books, and Laird took a very active role in that series, something he hadn't done with the original cartoon. I don't recall the exact dates off the top of my head, but if I recall correctly, Laird had bought out part of Eastman's share in the Turtles not long after The Next Mutation aired (1997-98), and may have bought out the rest of his interest in the Turtles around the time the new animated series started airing as part of the 4Kids Entertainment Saturday morning block.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that the Turtles hit a real low point in the late '90s, but Peter Laird brought things back on track early in the next decade. The new series wasn't the runaway hit that its predecessor had been, but it would have been hard for any cartoon to approach that level of success. The diehard fans embraced it, though, and it introduced yet another new generation of fans to the Turtles. Their ability to reinvent themselves every five years or so has been a big factor in their continued popularity with kids.

SPURGEON: How would you contrast where Laird and Eastman are in terms of how they feel about that whole major first-line-of-obit event of their lives? Are they both happy in terms of how everything worked out, do you think?

FARAGO: Both of them have said to me that they know they'll always be known as the co-creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and that's a pretty nice accomplishment no matter how you slice it.

Laird had full ownership of the Turtles when he sold them to Nickelodeon in 2009, and it basically came down to the fact that the Turtles were 25 years old, he was about 50, and I get the impression he didn't want to spend the rest of his life looking at financial spreadsheets and signing off on t-shirt designs. His deal with Nickelodeon allows him to publish his own Turtles comic if he wants, so I don't think he's ruling anything out.

Kevin Eastman has made and lost a couple of fortunes, has bought and sold the 1989 Batmobile and Heavy Metal Magazine, and I'm sorry there wasn't a documentary crew following him around constantly throughout the 1990s. [Spurgeon laughs] He's absolutely embraced his role as the Turtles' co-creator, doing the work-for-hire thing writing and drawing TMNT comics for IDW again, so he's come full circle in his career, getting to spend more time drawing comics now than he has in 30 years. He attends about 800 comic book conventions a year and always has a few hundred people waiting in line to meet him.

SPURGEON: He had an amazing line at this year's Heroes Con.

FARAGO: I got to sign books with him at the San Diego Comic-Con in July, and I got to feel like a real rock star for about two hours. Some people just shoved books under Kevin's nose, some shared their life stories, some grown men were shaking in their boots trying to work up the nerve to talk to him... but he made every single person in that line feel like there was nothing he'd rather do in the world than say hello to them and talk about the Turtles. It was one of those great "restore your faith in the power of comics" experiences.

So yeah, as far as my armchair psychology goes, they both seem really happy. Laird gets to stay at home and enjoy life without business meetings, and Eastman still gets the rock star treatment everywhere he goes. I don't think they'd ever trade places with each other, or anybody else, for that matter.

SPURGEON: I forgot to mention this earlier in a serious way. One thing that's very distinctive about this book is its art direction in terms of spotlighting the replication of actual items from the Turtles' publishing and licensing history. Have you ever worked with a book like this before? Are there specific challenges to it? What do you think it adds as an effect?

FARAGO: My previous "coffee table" history book was The Looney Tunes Treasury. My editor, Kevin Toyama, and his designers tracked down all of the artwork for the book, created some new art, and I think my only design input was suggesting some of the bonus insert materials and maybe some font recommendations. The publisher established the conceit, which was a history of the Looney Tunes as told by the characters themselves. It was a lot of fun to write, but nearly everyone who'd worked on the classic cartoons had died years ago, so my research was limited to existing Warner Bros. history books and DVDs.

With the Turtles book, I was able to interview dozens of people who'd worked on every aspect of TMNT, and that was a really nice change of pace. I'd never taken on a firsthand research project of this scope before, and I agreed to it before it sunk in just how big a task it was going to be.

I was a lot more involved with the art side of the book this time around, too. Finding original artwork, photographs, and other rarities was part of my contract this time around, and I managed to track down the original art from the first issue, several early covers, preliminary sketches that predated the first issue, some vintage photographs.it was a lot of work wrangling everything, but tracking down artwork has been my full-time job for almost 15 years now.

Insight Editions, my publisher, handled the actual layout and design, although I had a lot more input on that aspect of everything this time around, including recommendations for the bonus inserts. That's one of Insight's specialties, doing these treasury editions with replicas of vintage materials. If you buy one of their music history books, you'll get replica concert tickets and posters, things like that. With the Turtles book, we included a reprint of the first comic book, a copy of Eastman and Laird's press release announcing the launch of the comic, an early business card... Chris Prince, my editor, really pushed for adding inserts as an opportunity to add about 20% more artwork to the book, so that we didn't have to pass up too much of the fun stuff that we found. They're all designed to be removable, too, so you can take them out and store them in the envelope tucked into the book's back cover if you're so inclined.

My biggest contribution to the book's art was suggesting that we put Turtles from four different eras on the cover, and that we use the same layout as that iconic first issue of TMNT from 1984. I drew a few different versions, including one with several dozen additional characters in the background, but we ultimately went with the basic four-Turtle design. We got budget approval to commission new art for the cover, and initially, I lobbied to draw it myself and have Mirage Studios alum Ryan Brown, who coincidentally lives about 30 minutes away from the town where I grew up, ink it. My editor shot that down right away, so idea number two was to have Ryan pencil and ink the cover himself. Ryan told us he could talk Kevin Eastman into inking it, which was a no-brainer. Ronda Pattison's been doing a great job as the colorist on IDW's Turtles books, so she was my first choice for the cover, and I was able to talk my editor into that, too. I guess I've picked up a fair number of editorial and art director skills over the years.

SPURGEON: I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about the rest of your work while I still have you. You have a kid at home now, your first. How has that changed the way you look at the vocational aspects of comics? I know some people have been rattled when they have kids about the kinds of opportunities available to them, some even moving into other kinds of work because of that life event. Are you happy in comics?

FARAGO: Having a kid at home has changed everything. About three weeks separates the start of this interview and the last few questions here, and four months into fatherhood, I feel like I'm just finally starting to figure out how to fit a kid, a day job, and side projects into my schedule. It's been a very rewarding, very exhausting, very expensive four months, and the biggest change job-wise is that I'm putting a lot more time and effort into my writing, art, and comics, and I'm talking to a lot more editors these days about potential projects.

Up through the Turtles book, I was content to just take on projects as they've been offered to me, but medical expenses for the baby have taken a toll on our savings, so I've been a lot more proactive about my writing career. I've also been more selective about taking on anything that's going to keep me away from home or that isn't going to contribute to the baby fund. I've turned down a couple of convention trips and have opted out of a few other opportunities that would have left [Farago's wife, the cartoonist] Shaenon [Garrity] at home alone with the baby or would have monopolized time that I'd rather be spending with my newborn.

Am I happy in comics? I'm still having a great time as the curator at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum, and hope to have that job until I hit retirement age. I'm writing books on fun subjects, I've got a cartoonist at home who's drawing exactly the comic that she wants to draw.

I'd love to get some comic book writing jobs again, since I haven't done much of that lately, and my 12-year-old self is still hoping that Marvel will call and ask me to draw The Amazing Spider-Man for them, but I'm in a good place right now, and so is comics.

SPURGEON: Is "curator" an over-used word? Do you ever bristle when you hear people that aren't in a museum setting or something similar employ that word?

FARAGO: People curate their Netflix queues, they curate their dinner menus, they curate their iTunes playlists... [Spurgeon laughs]

It took most of my life for people to realize that cartoons were cool, so I'm glad the word "curator" is starting to catch on. I'm fine with casual usage of the word, but just like librarians bristle when people call anyone who works at a library a "librarian," I've had people claim curatorial credit by virtue of suggesting an exhibition subject to me or passing along contact information for an artist or a collector. I'm always glad to give credit where credit is due, but there's more to it than just knowing where the art is.

SPURGEON: Who's your least-favorite turtle?

FARAGO: Mark Volman. [Spurgeon laughs]

That's my Hollywood Squares answer, which come to think of it, is another increasingly dated reference.

It's probably a cheat to say Venus de Milo, the female turtle from The Next Mutation TV show, so I'll say that Michelangelo would probably be the worst fit for me as a roommate. Empty pizza boxes everywhere, the surfer accent that he somehow picked up in subterranean New York City, and you just know he'd ask you to cover his rent at least a few times a year.

*****

* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual Guide, Andrew Farago, Insight Editions, hardcover, 9781608871858, 198 pages, 2014, $50.
* Farago's Personal Site
* Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles At IDW

*****

* cover to the new book
* photo of Farago by Whit Spurgeon, 2012
* multiple images from the book, although one or two might be more random imagery from the Turtles' long existence. The contextually important ones are the scene of the turtles all together from that first comic, the full page which features Jim Lawson's work and the rough art from Andrew Farago of what he wanted the cover to look like. That last one was supplied by Farago.
* one more animation-era depiction of the Turtles [below]

*****

*****
*****

posted 8:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Neal Adams 1970s Superman Covers Mini-Gallery

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If I Were In New York, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In DC, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Richmond, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Denver, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Denver, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Milwaukee, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Grand Rapids, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Bologna, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Jonah Weiland!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 53rd Birthday, Masamune Shirow!

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FFF Results Post #401—Howard, The Lists

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Things About Howard The Duck That Can Be Organized Into A Cohesive List." This is how they responded.

*****

Tom Spurgeon

1. Val Mayerik
2. Frank Brunner
3. Gene Colan
4. Juan Bobillo
5. Joe Quinones

* Five Artists Affiliated With The Howard The Duck Character

*****

Oliver Ristau

1. Comic Book
2. Magazine
3. Newspaper comic strip
4. Trade Paperback
5. Hardcover

* Five publishing formats which featured stories of Howard the Duck.

*****

Sean Kleefeld

1. Daydreamers #1
2. Generation X #20
3. Spider-Man Team-Up #5
4. Marvel Team-Up #96
5. Howard the Duck: The Movie #1

* Five Comics Howard The Duck Appeared In But Shouldn't Have

*****

John Platt

1. Comic book
2. Comic strip
3. Treasury
4. Magazine
5. Omnibus

* Five formats of Howard the Duck publications

*****

Tim Hayes

1. The concept of a write-in candidate.
2. The correct use of the word bong.
3. Who Anita Bryant is.
4. That Gene Colan's art was scrumptious in black and white.
5. The existence of The Comics Journal via issue 41

* Things I learned about America via Howard the Duck from more than three thousand miles away.

*****

Justin Crouse

1. Sun Myung Moon
2. Lester Bangs
3. Anita Bryant
4. Justin Timberlake
5. Oprah Winfrey

* five public figures satirized by Steve Gerber in Howard the Duck.

*****

Tom Bondurant

1. A barbarian (issue #1, January 1976)
2. A human (issue #19, Dec. 1977)
3. A rat (2002 miniseries)
4. Sorcerer Supreme (Marvel Treasury Edition #12, 1976)
5. Iron Duck (issues #30-31, March-May 1979)

* Five alternate identities assumed by Howard the Duck

*****

Rob Salkowitz

1. (Adventures into) Fear
2. Giant-Size Man-Thing
3. Howard the Duck
4. Marvel Treasury Edition
5. Howard the Duck Magazine

* comics in which HTD appeared.

*****

Buzz Dixon

1. Turnip
2. Cow
3. Cookie
4. An egg
5. A glove

* Edible items featured on Howard The Duck covers

*****

Sean Rogers

1. A timely focal point for conversations about work-for-hire contracts
2. A long-moribund corporate property
3. Stewart the Rat
4. Destroyer Duck
5. A disquieting husk

* Five things that Howard the Duck became after Steve Gerber and Marvel had their falling out

*****

Dave Knott

* Colour comic book
* Newspaper comic strip
* Live action film
* Black-and-white comic magazine
* Video game

* Five media in which Howard The Duck starred in a namesake title

*****
*****

posted 2:00 pm PST | Permalink

The Comics Reporter Video Parade

The Art Of Richard Thompson

Two Promotional Videos From The Great Publisher Canicola

Jim Borgman In 2007 Talking About His Creative Process

Profile Of Harry Bliss

Zunar: Cartoonists Are Not Criminals

Never Posted This: Stan Lee's New Heroes Sketch From Key & Peele

posted 6:00 am PST | Permalink

CR Week In Review

The top comics-related news stories from November 15 to November 21, 2014:

1. The Malaysian cartoonist Zunar was detained and questioned by police about his new book, which they investigating under three different criminal charges.

2. Jillian Tamaki wins the Governor General's Award for her work on This One Summer, throwing a spotlight on both that awards program lack of interest in graphic novels for older readers (it's actually in the rules that these works are disqualified from consideration) and the difficulty with splitting creators with overlapping duties from consideration when it comes to making comics. Hopefully, this can be resolved.

3. ICAF, Short Run and Thought Bubble all ending last weekend throws a spotlight on the crush of shows throughout the calendar year. There's one weekend in April 2015 that has four prominent or at least well-known shows.

Winner Of The Week
Tamaki

Losers Of The Week
The Authories Bothering Zunar

Quote Of The Week
"[Johnny Hart] and his fabulous wife, Bobby, had bought a beautiful estate in Binghamton. He had a wonderful home and he built this gorgeous studio next to it, all on his property. One day, Bobby noticed that these sightseeing buses were pulling up to [the] entrance of their home, and people were getting out and taking pictures. She told Johnny that this was happening on a regular basis. Johnny thought it would be a good idea to pass out little signed copies of B.C. and Wizard of Id to give to these sightseers. So Johnny made up the cartoons and signed them and Bobby cooked cookies.

"So the next day, a sightseeing bus pulled up. ... Bobby would pass out the cookies and cartoons, tell them a little about [Hart's strips] and thanked them for coming. The people seemed very appreciative but a little puzzled and asked, 'What's B.C. and Wizard of Id?'

"What Bobby and Johnny later found out was that the hill they bought was the same hill [where] Joseph Smith [the founder of Mormonism] had received his golden plates that eventually became the Book of Mormon, And people still come today."-- Mike Peters

posted 12:00 am PST | Permalink

November 21, 2014

If I Were In Edmonton, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Richmond, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In San Francisco, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Milwaukee, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Grand Rapids, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Bologna, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 40th Birthday, Ethan Persoff!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 74th Birthday, Terry Gilliam!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 58th Birthday, Ron Randall!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 74th Birthday, Roy Thomas!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 64th Birthday, David Wenzel!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 20, 2014

Go, Look: Radio Wire

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Forthcoming Extra: Billy Ireland Announces KFS Exhibit, Opening

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library And Museum has announced its big 100 Years Of King Features Syndicate show. Some of you are probably hugely tired of me taking this rhetorical tack by now, but holy crap, we live in an astounding age for comics shows and exhibitions where this kind of thing can be put out there without widespread commentary. That's a line-up for that one-day of free events to match most comics shows, and the exhibit itself is the kind of thing that would have melted minds 10-20 years ago.

posted 10:29 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Howard The Duck Original Art, All Eras

posted 10:28 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled Extra: Chip Zdarsky And Joe Quinones On Howard The Duck

EW.com ran the announcement. Chip Zdarsky's a funny man, and very much on the upswing profile-wise because of his artistic contributions to Sex Criminals. Joe Quinones is about as talented as they come, too.

Will it be good? I don't know. A lot of that depends on how you view projects like this one. If you think of Howard The Duck as a Steve Gerber character exclusively, I can't imagine any other version will do. If you don't, there's every possibility this one will work, but will have to see: tendency to boil things down so they can be sold to Hollywood aside, comics are about execution rather than concept, and that extends to creative partnerships.

This project is also another sign of how rich in IP resources Marvel is right now, where you can pull a character out of limbo after decades of not having a successful comic book and it's this good of a character.

posted 10:27 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Alexis Beauclair

posted 10:24 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Michael Cavna At Comic Riffs On Top GNs Of 2014

Comic Riffs, the comics column over at Washington Post usually does two lists: one superhero-centric and one graphic novel (and mostly not superhero-centric). It doesn't look like the latter is ready to go, so I present all by its lonesome Michael Cavna's top graphic novels choices in their entirety.

His selections were:

* Bumperhead, Gilbert Hernandez (D+Q)
* Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)
* Hip Hop Family Tree Book Two (1981-1983), Ed Piskor (Fantagraphics)
* How To Be Happy, Eleanor Davis (Fantagraphics)
* Saga: Deluxe Edition Vol. 1, Brian K. Vaughan And Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
* Sisters, Raina Telgemeier (Graphix)
* The Graveyard Book Graphic Novel Vols. 1-2, Neil Gaiman And P. Craig Russell (Harper Collins)
* The Harlem Hellfighters, Max Books And Caanan White (Broadway Books)
* The Shadow Hero, Gene Luen Yang And Sonny Liew (First Second)
* This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki And Jillian Tamaki (First Second)

That's an interesting list, although one with which I'd have very little overlap were I to make one of my own. Still, it's a testament to how much good work there is out there right now that all of these different lists can be made.

posted 10:23 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Bernie Wrightson Early-‘70s DC Comics Title Pages

posted 10:22 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: The Folks Behind The Funnies

I want as many documentaries about comics as possible if only because of the raw footage and the ability of libraries around the country to host and archive them. I wish we had a similar wave in the late 1970s and got down all the great 1940s-era cartoonists, too. The Folks Behind The Funnies looks well-staffed. It also seems focused on strip cartoonists, but we need more work in that area just as much as we do in all the other areas.

posted 10:21 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Manning

some ugly, upsetting imagery there

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Collective Memory: Short Run 2014

this article has now been archived

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Images From The Superman #400 Gallery

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Collective Memory: ICAF 2014

this article has now been archived

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: It’s A Kind Of Magic

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Collective Memory: Thought Bubble 2014

this article has now been archived

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

OTBP: The Rebel Waltz

posted 9:50 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled Extra: Jessica Abel Releases Details On Her Narrative Techniques Of Radio Storytellers Book

You should read Abel's description of the forthcoming book (August 2015) here, if only because I probably did it in a disservice in the headline. Abel's a heavy-hitter in a generation that,unlike the one a half-step before, hasn't produced a lot of lifelong working cartoonists. So it's a thrill to hear she has a major book coming.

It looks like another Abel book about which you may have been hearing for a while now is due in January from Dargaud. So 2015 should be a big year for Abel.

posted 9:45 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Frankenstein #18

posted 9:40 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Super-Timely Interview With Frank Quitely About Pax Americana Over At Newsarama

Pax Americana -- the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely issue of the Multiversity project that deals with Charlton characters -- has hit extremely hard for a lot of readers this week, so having a Frank Quitely interview focused on the construction of certain pages seems like it's worth noting. Those two working together have made some fine comic books, and while I'm only one reading in -- it's that kind of comic -- this one seems to be right up there.

posted 9:35 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Winter Break

posted 5:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Alexander Matthews On Character Evolution

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Assembled, Zipped, Transferred And Downloaded: News From Digital

By Tom Spurgeon

* this preview reminds us that cyber-Monday is going to be a big, big, big deal for comics this year, as the infrastructure has improved for digital gift-giving basically all the way across the medium. There are going to be 18 billion sales, both from places like comiXology and from publishers with any kind of digital program they control, for work that's digital and for work that's simply purchased that way.

* Gary Tyrrell updates us on the Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, down to either three or four contestants. I think the eventual winner ascends to a higher state of humanity and immediately flies off of the planet to explore the universe, but I could be wrong.

* I don't have the skill set to vet this for you, but here's a webcomics contest that ended up in my inbox. They promise cash prizes and that you get to keep your copyright. So there it is, but be careful.

* I missed Matthew Derman's piece from a while back about the inevitability of digital comics. Mostly it reminds me that we're still unsettled in terms of digital comics' place in the world of arts consumption. That's a couple of distressing words to place right next to one another, but I think you know what I mean. We just don't have nailed down the basic model for people buying digitally -- the what and why and where. It's all over the place. At this point, I think of digital comics as their own thing and a concern for print comics in only specific circumstance due to the way the consumer cultures involved overlap and the margins that have been strained. That doesn't mean we've figured it out yet. I know that it's allowed me to have greater access to serial mainstream comic books, particularly when discounted, but I'm an atypical consumer.

* finally, I also don't know that I ever sat down to read this article on Marvel using the Kobo platform. I'm all for the widest availability of this work as is humanly possible barring my concern for the work itself and the recompense due to the creators.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Milwaukee, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Grand Rapids, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Bologna, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Dickie Dean

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I read a lot of comics featuring John Byrne's Wolverine when I was a wee lad and never knew this.

* Paul O'Brien on Nightcrawler #7. I wasn't even aware there was a Nightcrawler series right now. That's a pretty interesting creation to me as it sort of seems that, like The Thing (a bit) and Vision (a lot), Nightcrawler is a character out of his time. He's also one of those characters that I think has been most hurt by the extended period of time that Marvel has been around making narrative-intensive work with these characters.

* I'm just going to write about the X-Men from now on. That seems more fun.

* Okay, maybe not. I missed this Brandon Graham response comic to the James Sturm comic from a while back. I like just about everything that Brandon does, and this is sweet, but to my mind it makes the exact same point that the Sturm comic does, just in straight-forward fashion. Sturm shows two guys being ridiculous assholes you shouldn't be like; Graham shows two guys being cool dudes you should be like. It could certainly be a personal failing or a failing of privilege that I see that Sturm comic that way, but I do.

* David Betancourt talks to the new Wonder Woman team of Meredith Finch and David Finch. I read the comic book in question with a stack of comics earlier this week and I don't remember anything except that Wonder Woman was mad and people kept asking why she was mad, maybe? I don't know. It could have been just one person asking that. I thought the previous iteration of the Wonder Woman comic looked sharp and was at least slightly different than most of the New 52 product in terms of tone. What I read seemed like the rest of Wonder Woman's appearances in other modern DC comics, and DC Comics right now more generally across the board. I guess that could be the idea.

* not comics: these kinds of spaces will be a huge thing for artists over the next two decades, and already are for a ton of folks.

* finally, here's Steven Heller at The Atlantic on the complete Zap collection coming out. I hope that in addition to all the other things that a big collection like this can do that it throws a spotlight on Patrick Rosenkranz. No writer about comics has ever done better work with less appreciation than Rosenkranz.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 61st Birthday, Greg Theakston!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 42nd Birthday, Rich Johnston!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 36th Birthday, Karl Stevens!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 66th Birthday, Larry Welz!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 44th Birthday, Rich Tommaso!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 19, 2014

Go, Look: Josephin Ritschel

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Zunar Sends Out Release Concerning Police Interview

The Malaysian cartoonist Zunar has sent out another press release this morning, this time about being questioned by police in the course of a criminal investigation of his new book, Komplot Penjarakan Anwar ("Plot To Jail Anwar"). He also passes the extremely disturbing news that authorities have requested information on who might have ordered the book. Zunar just completed a four-year legal odyssey based on police overaggression during the publication of two 2010 volumes by winning in court. This new round started almost immediately after that court decision, with the detention of three Zunar assistants.

From the cartoonist:

"Today, I was questioned for about 45 minutes by the police regarding my new cartoon book, Komplot Penjarakan Anwar ('Plot to jail Anwar') at the Dang Wangi Police Station in Kuala Lumpur.

I was investigated under the 'Classified Crime Section' involving three different laws. The laws are:

a) Printing Presses and Publications Act
b) Sedition Act
c) Penal Code

Two separate police reports were made against me in two different police stations regarding the production of the book.

Throughout the investigation session, I refused to answer to any of the 27 questions asked by the police.

In the latest development, the police have asked the online payment gateway that handles my book transactions to disclose the list of customers who have purchased my books through my official website, zunar.my. In the email that was sent by MOLPay Sdn Bhd to me, it stated that they received a formal letter from the Police to disclose the list of customers.

'Police have sent a formal request for MOLPay Sdn Bhd to provide the online payment receipts of customers who have purchased the said book via your website www.zunar.my in which MOLPay has no choice but to furnish them with the requested details', the email from MOLPay stated.

Last week, three of my assistants were detained for five hours for selling my books. Several days after that, my webmaster was also summoned by the police to give statements."

As is usually the case with the Zunar stories, there is a bit of local coverage.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Unpublished Al Williamson Pen And Ink Drawings

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

I Will Never Get Tired Of Posting Links To Al Jaffee’s Tall Tales

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Amazing Adventures #3

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Funeral Pudding #1

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: Shows And Events

By Tom Spurgeon

* ICAF has announced for Spring 2016 in South Carolina, their first trip down south, unless you count DC.

* in many ways that count, the con season is over now. The Big Con season ends with NYCC. The traditional Alt-Con season ends with CAB, and it's pretty hard not to feel a sense of closure with ICAF, Short Run and Thought Bubble all hitting last weekend.

* CALA is forthcoming, but that's a new show and it's hard to imagine that in its first year it will feel like a grand finale. In fact, it will be an achievement if CALA goes well enough it feels like a coda. Genghis Con is more established but still finding its identity a bit, I think. There are also events in Grand Rapids and Milwaukee with some heft, and international events in Spain and France. There's a Comiket over the holidays, usually. So maybe things never, ever stop now.

* folks to whom I'm speaking are making their Angouleme plans, and I am very jealous of all those that get to do that show.

* other professional folks with whom I'm in touch are plotting out what they'll be doing well into next year, many with an attitude focused on being really choosy about what shows they do. It may end up being a tough few years that way. Fans and readers to whom I've spoken about shows seems much more local- and regional-oriented, but that makes sense and there are usually a lot more shows for people that way, too.

* I have some con news I'm going to discuss on Monday, news that's already out there in an unofficial capacity. If nothing else, it should clear up why I haven't been doing any con reports since before San Diego.

* I greatly enjoyed this sizable, photo-driven article about Short Run, and thought it deserved to have its link pulled out of the collective memory.

* finally, that's a fine line-up exhibitors for a first-time show: CALA. I hope it works; Los Angeles needs a good small press show and we need LA to have one. There are so many fine cartoonists out there as well as significant elements of the comics-making community infrastructure. I like it for that time of year, too, if it works. I'll be there, and I'm looking forward to it.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Seattle, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Los Angeles, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Jason Lutes’ Nickelodeon Comics

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I missed this Sean Kleefeld piece about dual-duty creators. I'm not sure it's possible to unearth a first because of the massively changing nature of the newspaper world in the early days of strip creation, but it's definitely worth noting what a dominant mode of arranging one's professional life this has been for a long, long time. For what it's worth, I once asked a syndicate editor why they asked so many editorial cartoonists to also do strips and for this person it was the ability to work with someone they knew would hit deadlines.

* Gary Groth talks to Robert Crumb and Ralph Steadman. Some unknown person talks to Hiroaki Samura.

* Greg Hunter on Fukitor and Dragon's Breath. Robert Kirby on Snackies. Sean T. Collins on Earthling and The Basil Plant.

* finally, I am greatly enjoying and learning from this column.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 48th Birthday, Guy Davis!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 48th Birthday, Jill Thompson!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 63rd Birthday, Carol Tyler!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 51st Birthday, Rian Hughes!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 34th Birthday, Ryan Estrada!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 45th Birthday, Stephanie Gladden!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 18, 2014

OTBP: Domestic Times #1

new Tessa Brunton

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Jillian Tamaki Wins Governor General’s Award

There's a really great reaction article here from the Edmonton Journal talking to Jillian Tamaki about her win of a Governor General's Award in the category of Children's Literature Illustration for her work in This One Summer. That is an extremely prestigious award, more than 75 years old, with a significant cash prize component. Congratulations to one of the best cartoonists out there.

Bart Beaty believes this is the first comic to win in any category.

Tamaki has some history with that awards program. When collaborator and cousin the writer Mariko Tamaki received a nomination for the text in their previous book Skim, Jillian's omission underscored the difficulty of singling out a creator in the comics-making process, particularly when hard corporate assembly practices aren't driving the creation. There was a revisiting of the issue this time around as well, and I imagine there may eventually be a comics-only category at these awards and any others like them.

The article in the Journal also notes that SuperMutant Magic Academy is due in the Spring, and suggests a third Tamaki/Tamaki collaboration could happen.

Update: According to Peggy Burns at D+Q: "La Pasteque has won a Governor General"s Literary Award three times. Isabelle Arsenault won in illustration-childrens last year for Jane, le Renard et Moi. La Pasteque has also won twice, for Harvey in 2009, both in children's writing and children's illustration (for different authors)." Burns notes that the guidelines specifically disqualify graphic novels in adult categories, which is just as much an inexplicable rule as the split categories, if not moreso.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: KC Green’s Take On Winnie The Pooh

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Your 2014 SPACE Prize Finalists

The Small Press & Alternative Comics Expo (SPACE) in Columbus, Ohio has announced its 2014 SPACE Prize Finalists. These are books collected by the show one year and then awarded at the next year's event. This year's nominees in four categories are:

*****

Graphic Novel Category

* Vol. 1, Rebecca Hilburn, $25">7" Kara Vol. 1, Rebecca Hilburn, $25.
* Autobiographical Conversations, Ryan Claytor, Elephant Eater Comics, $17.
* Binary Gray Vol. 1, Chris Charlton and Rowell Rogue, Assailant Comics, $19.99.
* Fear of Flying, Brian Canini, Drunken Cat Comics, $19.99.
* INC.Lings Vol. 1, Victor Dandridge and Ren McKinzie and Jacob Newell and Harold Edge, Vantage: Inhouse Productions, $14.
* Persia Blues, Dara Naraghi and Brent Bowman, NBM, $15.
* Purgatory Pub, Gabriel Dunston, Fire Light Media, $15.

*****

General Category

* Amiculus: A Secret History, Travis Horseman and Giancarlo Caracuzzo, $7.
* Binary Gray #5-6, Chris Charlton and Rowel Rogue, Assailant Comics, $3.99 each.
* Bones of the Gods, Craig Bogart, Mystery City Comics, $4.
* Black of Heart, Chris Charlton and David Holenbach, Assailant Comics, $4.99.
* Cash Out, James Moore and Joel Jackson, 2 Headed Monster Comics, $8.50.
* The Cornelia Collection, Kel Crum, Dangerous Bird Productions, $6.95.
* I'm Lost, Michael Rusnak Fehskens, $10.
* Once Upon a Platypus: Beginnings, Ron Braun, $7.
* Radio Free Gahanna #4-5, James Moore and Joel Jackson, 2 Headed Monster Comics, $4.50 and $5.50.
* The Samaritan: Collected Edition Vol. 2, Victor Dandridge and Ren McKinzie, Vantage: Inhouse Productions, $5.
* Woodstalk #1, Bruce Worden, Black Market Books, $3.

*****

Minicomics / Short Story Category

* A-Lure, Mike McCubbins, Big List Of Dead People, $20.
* At All Costs from The End #5, Sean Padraic Murphy and Sonia Liao, $5.
* Birds in a Sluddle, Pam Bliss, $2.50.
* Blindspot #3, Joseph Remnant, Kilgore Books, $7.
* Cuckoo, Jeff Zwirek, $3.50.
* Dutch Digest #8, Steven Hager and Bruce Rosenberger, Dutch Digest, $2.
* Limp Wrist, Scout Wolfcave and Penina Gal, $5.50.
* Murder on the North Sea, Christina Wald, Pop Smoothie, $2.
* Now & Then in Dark Horse Presents #30, Chad Lambert and Tom Williams, Dark Horse, $10.
* The Pine Bridge, Drew Brockington, Six First Class Stamps.
* So How 'Bout Comics?, Andrew Meyerhefer and Seth Kumpf, $3.
* Walrus #1, Brian J. Mitchell and Jared Catherine, Silber, $1.50.
* Witchcraft: The Conjuring, Jason Young, Buyer Beware Comics, $4.

*****

Webcomics Category

* Black Rose, Aaron Minies and Christopher Atudt and Brandon Peat
* Ineffables: Face of the Monster, Craig Bogart, Mystery City Comics
* Mutant Elf, Steven Myers, 1st Issue Comics
* Strawman, David Branstetter, Dim-Light Comics
* Sucker Street, Suzanne Baumann, Fridge Magnet Concoctions

*****

The winner of the general and graphic novel categories will receive $300 and a plaque, while the other two characters also get a plaque but only receive $100.

The plaque presentation is scheduled for April 11 during SPACE 2015 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel & Conference Center in Columbus. The convention itself is April 11-12.

*****
*****

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Bookmark: Bully On Fake Archie Comics Celebrities

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Assembled Extra: Congratulations To The Writer David Brothers On The Conclusion Of 4thletter!

The writer and now Image Comics staffer David Brothers has ended his self-directed team writing blog 4thletter! as of this note here. It is just short of ten years old. That was a very interesting blog to watch and read, and was in my primary on-line reading list from the early days of this site onward.

There was a lot of fun to be had there. You could see the writer's development, post to post and year to year, the great gift of on-line writing to audiences. You could take note of a context both contributor-wise and content-wise in which he and the other writers seemed to feel comfortable and valued (much of Brothers' final post is a love note to his colleague Gavin Jasper). You could also generally enjoy the various points of view expressed by Brothers and their rigorous defense via comments, whether or not you always agreed. David Brothers is of a different generation than mine; our backgrounds and value systems are distinctly our own, and our tastes clash, so I found his regularly articulated take on comics and comics-related things super-valuable. I'll miss reading the site, am honored that I was mentioned in that final post, and as always look forward to what he does next.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: I Don’t Know What It Is But I Like It

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

BIll Mauldin’s Cartoons Sorted: Two Cartoons Auctioned, Then Ten, Then A Big Donation To The LOC

This article about a forthcoming auction of two and then ten cartoons from Bill Mauldin, including the one depicted above, actually represents a bigger story: it would seem that the sorting of Mauldin's papers and holdings is done, or at least is at a point where the final dispensation of those treasures can be announced. Save for the auctioned pieces the Mauldin materials go to the Library Of Congress, an institution that apparently owns a significant selection of his artwork. I am all for the bulk of every artist's collection being held by our great libraries, particularly those set up to take care of them. I'm also not against some of these comics going public. That's a great Nixon cartoon, above; Mauldin was very straightforward in terms of his editorial cartooning.

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Jared Gardner’s Invasion Of The Funny Animals

posted 9:50 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: Nahleen And Cleo’s Medical Fund

I'm coming late to this -- they've just reached their goal -- but this crowd-funder put up by Corey Blake from over at Robot 6 is fairly self-explanatory and seems to me a decent, human thing to support. I hope any money raised eases some of those burdens and that circumstance diminishes the need as soon as is possible.

posted 9:45 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Listen: Jules Feiffer On Virtual Memories

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

This Isn’t A Library: New And Notable Releases Into Comics’ Direct Market

SEP140180 MULTIVERSITY PAX AMERICANA #1 $4.99
SEP140093 BPRD HELL ON EARTH #125 $3.50
SEP140047 DARK HORSE PRESENTS 2014 #4 $4.99
JUL140551 INVINCIBLE #115 $2.99
SEP148168 GRAYSON #1 3RD PTG $2.99
The belle of the comic-book format ball this week has to be the Multiversity one-shot from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Since this time it covers a planet based on a version of the Charlton characters, it's those two fine superhero comics makers getting to comment on Watchmen while at the same time playing with some of the ways that series redefined what we expect from coimic books. The BPRD is a pretty standard thing for us to recognize here; I collect those in comic-book format and read them in big gulps later on. The new DHP is already up to its fourth issue. This is a bridge comic for the Invincible series -- I'm interested to see what writer Robert Kirkman does with his narrative over the next couple of years. For a comic I probably wouldn't read except for this job and with which I don't engage as a fan, Invincible is fascinating from an execution standpoint and I always look forward to seeing it. The Grayson I've read and while it has devoted fans I'm not quite there with them -- it is worth noting a third printing, though. That one has hit with an audience.

JUL140096 MIND MGMT HC VOL 04 MAGICIAN $19.99
Already up to Volume 4 with Matt Kindt's series at Dark Horse. I get these when I can, and pay attention to the series in general.

AUG140511 POPEYE CLASSICS NEWSPAPER COMICS HC VOL 02 1989-1992 $39.99
I've barely seen the bulk of these Bobby London strips, but the ones I have seen all have a peculiar energy. Many of them are also quite funny. What I've read has such a different feel from the primetime Segar work that I see it almost entirely as its own thing, but I like that thing so that's okay. I'd certainly take a look.

SEP140596 BOUNCE TP (MR) $24.99
AUG140576 CASANOVA COMPLETE ED HC VOL 01 LUXURIA (MR) $29.99
SEP140626 LAZARUS HC VOL 01 (MR) $34.99
Three from Image I would imagine most genre fans with a little bit of spending money might want to have on their bookshelves. The Bounce book is the Joe Casey/David Messina/Sonia Harris team that pulls apart very specific parts of the superhero genre, mostly, as I recall, the idea of superheroes as avatars of purpose. The Casanova is the first cycle of the super-spy series with the beginning of the third upon us. I remember that being super-attractively designed. The Lazarus should be a big time gift book at that price and, one would guess, corresponding size. I enjoy that one, and I know 13-year-old me would have loved the depressing politics involved (it's a very, very broadly-played vision of a world controlled by corporate interests and their super-elite owners).

AUG141672 FIRST KINGDOM HC VOL 06 (MR) $19.99
I'm a great fan of Jack Katz's lengthy, idiosyncratic, science fiction in the key of ancient astronauts series First Kingdom, and I think this marks the latest collection of the work as a full collection. I'd love for people to be able to be exposed to this work in libraries and bookstores for years and years to come. It's an important book in that moment in time when cartoonists were figuring out what a graphic novel may look like in terms of ambition and scope.

AUG141638 NIKOLAI DANTE LOVE & WAR GN $29.99
I would cartainly at this book, starring what I think is the most high-profile 2000 AD character with whom I have no direct experience. That guy always looks like he's having fun, though, and I think Grant Goggans is a fan.

SEP141620 PETER PAN REGIS LOISEL HC OMNIBUS ED (MR) $49.99
One of the all-time loopy comics projects from a publishing news standpoint (which means yes, Tundra was involved) and the test-tube example of narrative drift. Still, there's a bunch of super-attractive cartooning in this single volume that might carry the day for anyone interested. You have to have a lot of virtues to be that weird.

AUG141138 ART OF MODESTY BLAISE SC $39.99
Sure, I'd look at this. I find the stories in Modesty Blaise almost ruthlessly dull, but it's always been pretty sharp-looking.

SEP141432 EC GEORGE EVANS ACES HIGH HC $29.99
I'm not sure how the Fantagraphics collections of EC material by author are doing, but this is the one on which I immediately flashed when the project was announced. Planes were Evans's special thing, one of the odder things at which to be very good doing in the entire realm of comics possibility.

*****

The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.

To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.

The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.

If I failed to list your comic, that's because I hate you.

*****

*****
*****

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were Near Coventry, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In San Francisco, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Listen: Nathan Fairbairn On Deconstructing Comics

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Henry Chamberlain on The Collector. James Kaplan on a bunch of different comics. Shawn Starr on Terror Assaulter.

* I occasionally get a little loss when mining Tumblr for individual posts -- that's not its function -- but I liked this encapsulation of productivity tips from the very prolific and hard-working writer Charles Soule.

* this person is way more ambitious than I am, even now.

* don't think I ever saw this Doom Patrol comic, the result of a lost bet.

* Michael Cavna speaks to the filmmakers behind the new Richard Thompson documentary. Richard Thompson has had one hell of a year, between the gallery show and the documentary and the complete Cul De Sac book and its continuing presence on-line. The deserved recognition given that work is one of the indisputably good things comics has done in the last two decades.

* finally, Warren Ellis presents a Philosophy Of Human Life.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 55th Birthday, Steve Lightle!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 40th Birthday, Jesse Fuchs!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 17, 2014

Go, Look: Vee’s Dumping Grounds

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Round-Up Of Cartoonists Wishing Happy 50th To Wizard Of Id Newspaper Strip

Good week for Michael Cavna, who remembered (or was reminded about) the 50th anniversary of the Wizard Of Id feature and did a round-up of reactions here.

I'm generally curious about the role that the 1960s hardcore gag-type strips had on the development of features on the newspaper page. I assume they had a role, because my mind is filled with all of the set pieces and gags these strips employed, but I think we kind of allow Doonesbury and then the Calvin & Hobbes/Far Side/Bloom County '80s trio to dominate any discussion of the last 50 years on the comics page. If nothing else, strips of this nature found a strong champion in Garfield, only without the abstraction of genre elements involved.

I laughed at a lot of those paperbacks when I was a little kid. I'm not sure that all of them are worth the time to dig in and read, but the Michael Peters entry was fun.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Dracula Deronda

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

OTBP: Tusen Hjärtan Stark #2

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Ronald Searle In Granta

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Fionnuala Doran

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked: Publishing News

By Tom Spurgeon

* Fantagraphics reveals the final cover for their collection of the Peter Bagge-masterminded Sweatshop series (there were several artists involved). I know that's a reprint project and not even necessarily a high-profile one, but I think I like that one best of the post-Hate Peter Bagge projects in a number of ways and I'm a huge Peter Bagge fan.

* the artist Tula Lotay, currently working with Warren Ellis on a comic featuring the Supreme concept/character, will work with Ellis again in the future.

* Joe Decie writes about his latest project, Collecting Sticks and the support from the Lakes International Comic Arts Festival that helped support its creation.

* this discussion from Carla Hoffman about comics and professional wrestling uses as its springboard news that CM Punk will be contributing a story to Marvel.

* Jim Lee will join Grant Morrison on one of the Multiversity one-shots. My main entry into Jim Lee's art is wishing for him to work with various high-end comics writers.

* we're starting to see the Fall 2015 books show up on various web sites devoted to bookselling. Here are a few from Fantagraphics.

* finally, Bart Beaty talked a bit about his book Twelve-Cent Archie, due out early next year from Rutgers University Press. Apparently Beaty's reading and analysis of 1960's Archie books mirrors the multiple short-story format of the comics, with dozens upon dozens of chapters. I look forward to it.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Early-Era Wonder Woman Stories

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Dennis The Menace Fun Book

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Alex Buchet takes a walk through various TCJ covers.

* Didier Pasamonik talks to Jean-Luc Fromental. Abhay Khosla profiles -- briefly -- John Paul Leon. That's a fun image he includes. Paul Gravett profiles Max.

* Heidi MacDonald runs a photo from a store-site interview in 1987.

* whoa, check out this portrait drawn by Milton Caniff. Happy birthday, indeed.

* I can't remember where I picked up this link, so apologies to that person, but here's a conversation between Katsuhiro Otomo and Takehiko Inoue.

* Dominic Umile on Here.

* finally, I love the headline on this CBR take on the ICv2.com number regarding new comics consumers. It's unintentionally '50s-style alarmist.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 61st Birthday, Alan Moore!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 16, 2014

Go, Look: Derek Van Gieson’s Etsy Shop

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Rémy Coutarel

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Michael Cavna Interviews Flemming Rose

Michael Cavna at Comic Riffs talks to Flemming Rose, the Jyllands-Posten editor that commissioned the Muhammad cartoons that led to the "Cartoon Crisis" of mid-last decade. It's an interesting interview, and I look forward to reading the book. Rose makes a fine point that Orthodox Christians in Russia have a lot in common with extremists responding in criminal fashion to perceived insults to Islam.

At the same time, I hope there's a better explanation to exactly what he was thinking when he commissioned those cartoons than what we get from his conversation with Cavna: that sounds like a practiced answer, not an insightful or reasonable one. I'm also glad Cavna pointed out the inherent silliness of standing against self-censorship and then self-censoring via the choice of publishing contract. A stand-alone book about those cartoons that doesn't include the cartoons seems silly to me, just as it would seems silly if I were to publish one of the cartoons here in a decorative/illustrative sense. I don't know why it seems to be so hard to sort out pretty basic journalistic and institutional responsibilities when it comes to this story.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: 20,000 Leaks Under The Sea

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Whiz Wilson

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Muscles Comics

posted 9:30 pm PST | Permalink

Comics By Request: People, Places In Need Of Funding

By Tom Spurgeon

* I haven't looked at the Seth Kushner gofundme campaign in a while, and it's close enough I hope that can be done sometime this holiday season.

* I don't really understand this interface and I don't have time to figure it out, but I think this is where Dan Vado's Patreon campaign can be found. The longtime comics publisher shut down a recent gofundme campaign.

* I'm kind of out of touch on formal crowdfunding projects right this moment, but certainly this one for The Complete Smilin' Ed caught my eye. FantaCo 4-ever.

* "Translating Pow Pow Press" was brought to my attention earlier this morning, but that one seems really interesting and I want the link here so I can go back and consider supporting it. Ken Eppstein tweeted his support of this project, and I'm all for more comics about beer and Pittsburgh.

* finally, that Tezuka campaign never got out of the stall that came with the initial blowback.

posted 9:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were Near Siegen, I’d Go To This

posted 9:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In London, I’d Go To This

posted 9:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portland, I’d Go To This

posted 9:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Uncle Gideon’s Gold

posted 9:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Alan Gardner brings word that Art Wood has passed away. RIP.

* Sean Gaffney on Whispered Words Vol. 2. Jog on Wolverine. Paul O'Brien on various Death Of Wolverine one-shots. Sean Gaffney on Ranma 1/2 Vols. 9-10.

* Todd Klein has started what could be a rewarding look at the digital lettering of comics: 1, 2, 3.

* Moyoco Anno has an Instagram account featuring a ton of sketches. What a fun cartoonist.

* Andrew Steinbeiser talks to CB Cebulski.

* Sean Kleefeld is writing about comics rugs. Kleefeld has old-school blogging instincts in the best way: instead of writing about the latest round of topics dictated by social media, he seems to write about whatever the hell he wants.

* finally, Robert Clough explores The Applied Cartooning Manifesto.

posted 9:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 48th Birthday, Ed Brubaker!

posted 9:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 53rd Birthday, José Villarrubia!

posted 9:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 44th Birthday, Cullen Bunn!

posted 9:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 15, 2014

CR Sunday Interview: Eric Haven

*****

I've been following the comics of Eric Haven for some years now, so I was surprised when I sat down to prepare for the following conversation I knew absolutely about the cartoonist beyond that he worked for the Mythbusters. What I found was a pretty common story; we're near same-age peers, he had ambitions like many of the emerging artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s to be a working comics person, since that wasn't in the cards he's adjusted and continued to do work as opportunities and inspiration allowed. Everything else I know you'll know about 20 minutes from now.

Haven's latest comics is UR, from AdHouse Books. I liked it quite a bit, and am grateful the Bay Area resident took my questions. -- Tom Spurgeon

*****

TOM SPURGEON: Eric, I've a hard time figuring out a lot about your past on my own. My take is that you're in your mid-forties and were a pretty standard comics reader as a young person. Is that fair? What were your early experiences with comics?

ERIC HAVEN: Yep, good guess. I'm 47 years old, and growing up as a kid in the '70s I had extremely limited access to comics in comparison to today. Obviously no Internet, but also no comic stores or comic conventions. At least not in the Syracuse area.

Luckily for me, my parents enjoyed reading and going to bookstores. One discount store we'd frequent would put unsold newsstand comics in a box for 10 cents each, their covers torn off because the seller returned them to the publisher for credit. It's not precisely legal, but it was a gold mine for me as a kid. For many years, the proper look and feel of comics for me was the coverless guts. If I ever happened to purchase a comic at a magazine stand, I'd tear the cover off when I got home. It just didn't look right to me... too garish, too slick.

Even at the cost of 10 cents each I couldn't afford to buy a lot of comics as a kid so the ones I had were read innumerable times over. I studied the entire comic; not only the story itself but also the advertising and letter columns and editorial pages. After a while I learned to identify the artists -- pencilers, inkers, some letterers and colorists -- without looking at the credits.

Reading the comics over and over again I became obsessed with the Marvel characters and their interlocking continuum. And the stuff Marvel was putting out then was completely mind-destroying to a kid like me... a heady onslaught of Man-Thing, Killraven, [The] Korvac Saga, Werewolf By Night, Panther's Rage, Deathlok, X-Men, Black Goliath, etc. etc. DC Comics -- or any other comics -- didn't even register. Marvel was it.

If I think of myself as a sword, Marvel was the forge which banged and smashed my brain into a certain shape.

SPURGEON: You talk in one interview about winning a contest for comics, and the disillusion that followed when you eventually discovered there was no money to be had making them as you hoped you'd might. Can you walk me through that extended experience? How did it finally dawn on you that comics might not have a place for you at the time you were considering making them?

HAVEN: Shortly after moving out here to the Bay Area in 1989 I saw that the alt-weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian was conducting a "cartoon contest." I thought I'd give it a shot and drew a one-page strip that featured Little Nemo, Zippy the Pinhead, Calvin & Hobbes, Spider-Man, and others. It won the parody category and a panel from the strip was blown-up and showcased on the cover of the paper the week they published the contest results.

When I saw that paper with my art on the cover, on the street for all to see, I thought, "This is easy!" I quit my day job as a security guard and flung myself into drawing more comics. Which was stupid, because I ran out of money very quickly. I luckily found an office job with regular hours and continued to draw comics in the evening, on weekends, and over holidays. By the Fall of 1991 I had put together a 24-page black and white comic called Angryman. It ended up getting published by IconoGrafix, an imprint of Caliber, in April 1992.

That month I quit my day job, determined to make it as a comic artist. I sat at the drawing board at least 8 hours every day and maintained a pace of about four pages a week. By the time I finished the 2nd issue of Angryman, the first issue had made it into stores. I was so incredibly psyched to see it on the shelves at Comic Relief in Berkeley. I had first sold Angryman there as a hand-stapled xeroxed mini-comic so to see it there now as a professionally-published comic was almost overwhelming to me.

But after seeing what I made on the first issue (precisely $100, still by far the most money I've ever made for a comic book) I realized there was no hope for me to make a living at it. So I went back to the day job and continued to draw comics on evenings and weekends and holidays.

It was depressing to think I couldn't make a living as a comic artist. But I also feel that it worked out for the best: I could draw whatever I want at my own pace, not being tied to a strict deadline or a regular title. I did one more issue of Angryman before quitting that and focusing on creating mini-comics.

SPURGEON: Am I right that you knew the late Dylan Williams when you were both in the Bay Area? I know he meant a lot of things to a lot of people. What were your experiences like with him?

HAVEN: It's difficult to contemplate the effect Dylan had on my career as a comics artist. I'm not even sure I'd still be drawing comics now if not for Dylan's initial championing of my stuff.

I first met Dylan when he was working at Comic Relief. Right away we started talking about favorite artists and comics. At that time I thought I had an in-depth knowledge of comics and creators, having studied various book collections. But Dylan's knowledge was vast.

It was Dylan who got me fired up on comics again after I realized I couldn't make it as a professional artist. He was so enthusiastic about comics it'd be infectious. After speaking with him my head would be spinning with possibilities. It didn't matter if I couldn't make money at this. It was art.

There were many artists I had never heard of before being shown their work through Dylan. [Mort] Meskin, [Jesse] Marsh, [George] Roussos. [Fred] Guardineer, [Ogden] Whitney, [Alex] Toth. [Harvey] Kurtzman, [Bernard] Krigstein, [Joe] Maneely. You can find their work in two seconds on the Internet now, but back then it was a challenge. Dylan would print collections of the stuff he liked and just give them to people. It wasn't for sale; it was for study.

I know I'm not the only one within Dylan's sphere of influence. When he died I realized a massive, sucking void had been left in his absence.

SPURGEON: How then did you get back into making comics? Because my memory is that I first heard of you when you had done completed work pretty much of a kind with the work you're still doing now.

HAVEN: I've never really stopped making comics since I started in 1985. I've just had long fallow periods between published works. There's almost 10 years between the publication of Angryman #3 and Tales To Demolish #1. There's six years between The Aviatrix and UR. But in those intervening years I've always continued to make comics. They're just seldom seen.

SPURGEON: I don't know that I've talked to that many people that have the experience of publishing through Alvin Buenaventura, and I believe that at least The Aviatrix came through one of his houses. What was it like doing that book?

HAVEN: It was great! Alvin's very chill, he has a keen eye, and he's a perfectionist. The Aviatrix turned out exactly as I wanted. I was disappointed when he discontinued the line; it was pretty cool to be published with Lisa Hanawalt, Matt Furie, and especially Ted May. Injury is one of the greatest comics ever.

SPURGEON: One thing I think it's fair to say connects all of the work of yours I've seen, or at least a great deal of it, is a sense of timing that seems more in line with offbeat or even poorly done comics in the past.

HAVEN: Timing and pacing are really important. One can play with style and structure but it works best, I think, if one understands how storytelling works and how important the beats are to serving an overall effect.

SPURGEON: There's a Fletcher Hanks element to some of what you've done. Is that intentional? How important to you is pacing? How much do you work on the timing of your stories?

HAVEN: Yes, my "Bed Man" strip is an homage to Fletcher Hanks. I found some of his Stardust comics on a message board one day and it blew my mind. I was thrilled when Fantagraphics announced they'd be releasing a collection.

"Bed Man" is the result of studying the Fletcher Hanks strips and seeing how he broke down a story. I drew it in an approximation his style, but the main thing I wanted to explore was the pacing. How does he tell a story over five pages? Where are the turning points? It was very educational.

SPURGEON: Tell me about the work that ended up in UR... Is all of this on-line work, I'm thinking maybe the "Man-Cat" stories are something I saw in print, but I'm not sure. Can you talk to me about how you conceived of this as a book, where the work itself started and even if you see this collection as having a creative cohesion?

HAVEN: UR is a collection of work that's previously appeared in anthologies and magazines. That's why the format dimensions for each story are different. I also put some of the strips on my web site when I became paranoid that some other Eric Haven would take that domain name.

I originally conceived of this thing as a massive collection of work, spanning the last decade and a half. But Chris and I whittled it down to something more manageable. The comics contained within it were created separately and not intended to be packaged together but I think the book holds together well as a single piece. For one thing the color palette is similar throughout and for another the stories all deal with apocalyptic themes. It's about death, destruction, and ruin. But funny!

SPURGEON: Why Chris [Pitzer] and AdHouse Books? Chris tells me he was happy that you guys got along so well when he met you recently, which says to me you didn't have any sort of prior relationship. What were the virtues of what AdHouse does that made you take the book to them? Were there other suitors? What was that process like?

HAVEN: It's all because of Rina Ayuyang, publisher of Yam Books. Last year she conducted an art auction to benefit the Red Cross' typhoon relief effort in the Philippines. I offered an original "Race Murdock" strip and it turned out that Chris Pitzer was the high bidder -- there's rumors that a brief bidding war erupted between Chris and Jim Rugg. [Spurgeon laughs]

Chris reached out to me after receiving the artwork and we started talking about doing a project together. We discussed several different formats before zeroing in on the final design. The entire time I was impressed with his ideas and his professionalism, but on top of that he seemed like a really nice guy. That hunch was confirmed when we met at APE this past October.

SPURGEON: I'm not even sure why this pops into my head, but reading the UR stories it seems to me that a lot of them are pretty straight-forward thematically: they are explorations of single ideas. How do you approach the short stories from the blank page? Is there a concept, do you think in terms of the narrative and the rest takes care of itself? Is there purposeful subversion of other forms or even individual stories?

HAVEN: I start with a single image or a sequence of images that I'd like to draw and then I structure the story around that.

For example, there's a story in UR called "The Equestrian." It started as an itch to draw something that reminded me of old Currier & Ives prints I'd see at my grandmother's house. Then I'd let my imagination take it to a really absurd place, where a demonic horseback rider is destroying everything around her, even cracking the world in half with her riding crop.

I don't know what I'm trying to do with that one. It's just me following a gut instinct to draw certain images. Maybe I'm allowing my subconscious have free reign on the drawing board. It's not completely random -- I definitely want to express a precise emotional tone to the reader -- but the mechanics of transmitting that tone are elusive.

SPURGEON: Does the violence in the story necessarily represent a cynical view of the world? I mean, do you think most things end in catastrophic violence, or is that a narrative technique for you? Would you even agree with a view of your stories that things mostly end poorly?

HAVEN: Yeah, that's my view of the world in general. I feel as if we've struggled through a very dark time in the last 15 years, starting with the election of George W. Bush. To me, the world slipped out of sync that day. Exacerbate that with 9/11, the headlong rush to jingoism, wars in foreign countries, the collapse of the economy, pending global disasters, a shriekingly apocalyptic news and entertainment media... yeah, I have a cynical world view.

But I also think that the dark stuff can be really funny. Existential dread expressed as black humor. If the timing and set-up is right, a picture of the world exploding can be hilarious.

SPURGEON: Can you talk a bit about the end of Reptilica? I found that one fascinating just in terms of its physical construction; you go from these fairly involved pages and climactic violence to this upending coda that also changes the rhythm of the story in a major way.

HAVEN: After drinking several Manhattans at a bar one evening, I stumbled into a bookstore and browsed through a hardcover collection of old newspaper comic strips. In it there was a two-page spread of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates that caught my eye and something about this sequence of strips truly affected me.

Even without reading the words the narrative was clear -- a main character was dying, apparently the love of Terry's life -- and the brushstrokes and compositions created a mood that struck a particular emotional tone. It was very effective. My heart welled up when I looked at it. But I may have been an easy target audience because I was drunk.

I was fascinated with how that feeling overtook me. Was there a way to replicate the experience? Could I draw a two-page spread that would induce that lump-in-the-throat feeling? That was the goal I set for myself, a piece intended for the oversize Kramers Ergot 7.

I don't think I succeeded as I had wished but that's what I was trying to do with "Reptilica"... strike a certain emotional tone. Maybe people should read the comic while drunk. Maybe that's the way it works.

SPURGEON: I love the broken panel on the last page of "Bed Man." How did it occur to you to use that?

HAVEN: It was a way to underline the sense of falling asleep. The panel borders break away as he descends into the landscapes of his subconscious mind. I may have been inspired by Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze, who'd blow apart the panel borders when he sneezed, but it wasn't my intent to emulate that. I just thought it'd make an effective page design.

SPURGEON: Were the "Race Murdock" strips formatted for an alt-weekly run? Was there something you wanted to say about that format, maybe?

HAVEN: The Race Murdock strips were formatted like newspaper strips: single tier, four panels. I love that format... I did a daily strip for the Syracuse University student newspaper for three years so I'm very familiar with it. But I'm now in middle age and the "Race Murdock" size constraints became almost painful. My eyes and fingers were feeling it and I needed some breathing room.

SPURGEON: I like how playful those "Race Murdock strips" are, how you slip in an out of a continuity, for example. It seems like a really strong vehicle for you, but I honestly couldn't tell -- you do them for a while, and I can see how that might become tiresome or limiting. All of your work kind of suggests this question: Could you do a extended series of stories featuring one concept, or do these comics represent everything you'd like to say and you're done when you're done? Why that restlessness?

HAVEN: I draw very slowly. It now takes me a week to draw a page on average. Because of that, I need to wrap my stories up within several pages time or run the risk of becoming bored. Long, intricate story lines might be outside my reach. Staying invested in a single protracted narrative would require me to have a sustained interest over many years. I know that's not very likely so I have to get in, do the best I can, and get out before the engine dies.

SPURGEON: This probably applies more to your career generally than it does UR specifically, but why so many images of transformation?

HAVEN: I'm not sure. The act of transforming from one thing into something else is both fascinating and repulsive. You can't look at it but you can't look away either. I guess I'm interested in things that are painful and ecstatic at the same time, like birth. Or it all may stem from watching a lot of body horror movies in the 80s.

SPURGEON: As I know very little about your past, I know even less about your future plans? Is there going to be more comics work for you? Is this something you'd explore more thoroughly if it had been as rewarding as you once thought?

HAVEN: I can't see myself stopping drawing comics entirely. My page count may continue to fall, my eyesight may continue to deteriorate, but I do this because it makes me happy. Nothing is as rewarding to me as a completed page and a finished book. It's tremendously fulfilling.

I wish there was more money in it. I think I could do great work if I had more time and resources to devote to the craft. But the present conditions are my reality.

The current project I'm working on, not attached to any publisher at the moment, is a sword & sorcery epic. Regardless of the fear of how long it will take me I hope it'll end up being a graphic novel. I'm approaching it the same way I created the strips in UR... following my gut, drawing whatever bubbles up from the subconscious. It's going to be wild.

SPURGEON: Your publisher suggested I ask you about your day job with Mythbusters. Is that a good gig from which to spend your time doing something like UR? Is there a go-to story you have about working there?

HAVEN: MythBusters is a great gig for me. I've always had an interest in urban myths and I'm highly skeptical, so being able to research and produce content for the show has been creatively and intellectually fulfilling.

One benefit to working in TV is that there are frequent production hiatuses. I can sometimes get a few weeks off, even a couple months, and use the time to work on my own projects. I guess I'm doing the same thing now that I did earlier in my career: work for a while, quit work to draw, then go back to work.

It might not be the best financial decision for me to take these comic-drawing breaks but it helps to keep me sane.

*****

* UR, Eric Haven, AdHouse Books, comic book format softcover collection, 48 pages, 9781935233305, December 2014, $14.95.

*****

* cover to the new book
* photo supplied by the cartoonist; that's him on the right
* from "Even An Android Can Dance"
* cover to an issue of Angryman
* image from The Aviatrix
* from "Bed Man"
* from "The Equestrian"
* from "Reptilica"
* from "Bed Man"
* transformation in "Man Cat"
* pre-transformation "Man Cat"
* one last image from UR, this one from "The Equestrian" (below)

*****

*****
*****

posted 8:00 pm PST | Permalink

Missed It: Significant Pimo And Rex Preview At It’s Nice That

posted 5:00 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portland, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Seattle, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Durham, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In New Orleans, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 51st Birthday, Jim Ottaviani!

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The Comics Reporter Video Parade

Independent Sources On Diversity In Comics

Watch Pat Oliphant Draw

Takeshi Obata Drawing At NYCC 2014

Ellen Forney & Julia Wertz At The Strand In 2012

A Chunk Of An Eric Jolliffe Profile

Quino Interviewed

Trailer For Festival Circuit Movie Featuring Cartoonist Hanneriina Moisseinen

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CR Week In Review

The top comics-related news stories from November 8 to November 14, 2014:

1. Public support from a Malaysian Human Rights organization falls to Zunar, once again under pressure from police authorities in his country for publishing work that by any rational world standard is pretty mild political commentary and no danger to anyone.

2. Charles Hatfield, Susan Kirtley and Nhora Serrano were named interim officers of a new professional organization for comics scholars, The Comics Studies Society.

3. Comic Arts Brooklyn ends its second year and first as a formal, two-day show.

Winner Of The Week
Roz Chast

Loser Of The Week
Anyone that uses altered or massively re-contextualized art over the objections of the art-maker to practice political advocacy.

Quote Of The Week
On the one hand: these characters aren't sacrosanct; they get changed and updated all the time. On the other hand: to turn Wonder Woman into the daughter of Zeus is to take a massively influential female hero and icon whose unique origins lie in the suffrage and birth control movements, and whose origin story is taken directly from Progressive era feminist utopian fiction, and turn her into a stock element in a Percy Jackson knockoff. You could take away Krypton from Superman, too, and decide, say, that Superman is the son of Odin, or that he's George Washington brought back from the dead, or that he has a sidekick named Watson, or two heads. But then, of course, he wouldn't be Superman." -- Jill Lepore, on recent changes to the Wonder Woman character.

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November 14, 2014

Missed It: Jane Mai Profiled At Boing Boing

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If I Were In Philadelphia, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Columbus, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Seattle, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In NYC, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 51st Birthday, Renée French!

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Durham, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In New Orleans, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Columbus, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 47th Birthday, Ariel Olivetti!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 45th Birthday, Jessica Abel!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 42nd Birthday, Gus Mastrapa!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Isao Tomita: Switched On

I can't figure out how to make a jpeg of the actual imagery, so here's an album cover

posted 2:30 am PST | Permalink

The Comics Studies Society Organizes At ICAF

The longtime writer about comics, educator and scholar Charles Hatfield led a meeting during the lunch period at today's International Comic Arts Forum session in Columbus, Ohio to announce, further organize and gauge initial interest in a new professional organization for comics educators and scholars.

The Comics Studies Society will promote the interests of that group of comics-interested professionals, which will include those involved in the study of comics at the university level and those involved in teaching comics. It will also included independent scholars. An ad hoc ballot was presented, voted upon and collected at the meeting with three officers running unopposed and a pool of ten members-at-large candidates expected to yield four such members.

The Interim President, Interim Secretary and Interim Treasurer candidates were Charles Hatfield, Susan Kirtley and Nhora Serrano, respectively. The pool of at-large membership candidates was Corey K. Creekmur, Brian Cremins, Richard Graham, Mark Heimermann, Aaron Kashtan, Andy Kunka, Andrei Molotiu, Matthew J. Smith, Rebecca Wanzo and Qianna Whitted.

The meeting took place in the Will Eisner seminar room at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. I would say the crowd was between 45 and 50 interested people. The OSU professor Jared Gardner, helping to physically run the meeting, said that some folks were allowed to vote without being there. General aims and principles such as a commitment to diversity and a desire to mentor younger members split time with discussion of practical matters that should face the new group immediately, such as a dues structure and non-profit status.

We wish the new group the best of luck and look forward to seeing what they accomplish.

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November 13, 2014

Go, Look: Rachael Smith

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Altered Cartoon’s Employment In Political Campaign Drives Significant Pushback

The Guardian has a short piece up here about a politician named Jacqui Lambie using an altered version of a cartoon by David Pope to a political end, and the resulting flurry of criticism and defenses against criticism. It seems to be one of those things where it's probably not illegal to do the thing in questions, it's debatable whether it's affront, and it's wholly and obvious a rotten idea because all it's going to lead to is someone repeating the original criticism and savaging you for the appropriation involved. -- a recurring, similar story in the US is the use of pop songs within political campaigns.

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Go, Look: Ronald Searle In John Bull Magazine

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Collective Memory: CAB 2014

this article has now been archived

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Katie Green

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Assembled, Zipped, Transferred And Downloaded: News From Digital

By Tom Spurgeon

* Oliver East has a new work up at Comics Workbook. I like just about everything East does.

* so a long time ago we promised to pay attention to Meredith Gran's Patreon campaign to see how valid it might be for a working cartoonist to turn her fans into perpetual support for serial work. I would say that level of support makes it a success.

* they are still looking for buyers of The Nib's 2015 Calendar Of Obscure Holidays.

* The Cyanide And Happiness Show. This was crowdfunded.

* finally, the writer Johanna Draper Carlson has a succinct write up of Vertical's digital Tezuka initiative here and notes an on-line offering of an already-exsiting Ed Piskor project.

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If I Were In LA, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Portland, I’d Go To This

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If I Were Near Denver, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Seattle, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In New Orleans, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Columbus, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Jaguar

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Todd Klein on Dark Horse Presents #33. Sean Gaffney on Ubel Blatt Vol. 0.

* congratulations and good luck to Team Al-Shakmagiya. Sublimely interested to see how that turns out.

* I enjoyed this image from Carlos Santoja.

* one of the interesting things about Marvel benching the Fantastic Four -- and there's no lack of interesting things about that -- is that it reduces their character pool a bit, particularly in that there's no broader category for the former company flagship (they aren't Avengers or X-Men). One title that seems like an expansion over the last 10 years is the Guardians Of The Galaxy expression that drove the movie version. Although I can't tell what is going on just by looking at the way Marvel has used that property -- I could not tell you the year by issue title, always a bad sign -- my sense is there's some room to stake out some territory there.

* finally, Rob McMonigal thinks you ought to attend Short Run in Seattle tomorrow, and I agree: you should.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 41st Birthday, Anders Nilsen!

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Happy 56th Birthday, Edd Vick!

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Happy 31st Birthday, Jen Vaughn!

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Happy 46th Birthday, Brad Mackay!

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November 12, 2014

Go, Look: Corban Wilkin

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Malaysian Human Rights Group SUARAM Releases Statement Of Support For Artist Zunar

The cartoonist Zunar has released a statement of support from Yap Swee Seng, the Executive Director of Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) concerning the latest round of engagement between the cartoonist and police authorities in his home country. I'll run it in full, mostly because I'm furious about this story even existing.

Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) decries the unrelenting harassment and persecution by government against political cartoonist Zulkifli Anwar Ulhaque, or better known by his pen name Zunar. We demand the police and Home Minister to uphold Zunar's constitutional right to express his ideas and cease all harassment against Zunar, three of his assistants, webmaster, printers and bookstore vendors.

For the longest time, Zunar has been attacked by the police and the Home Ministry for producing cartoons that were purported to be detrimental to public order. More than 400 copies of his books were confiscated and five of his books titled "Perak Darul Kartun", "1 Funny Malaysia", "Isu Dalam Kartun" Vol. 1, 2 and 3 were banned by the Home Minister from 2009 to 2010. Government's determination to persecute Zunar was extended to printers, vendors and bookstores around the country - their places were raided and they were warned to not print and carry any of Zunar's book in future.

And of late, on 6 November 2014, Zunar's assistants - Rizaldy Rafie, Raja Norita and Norliza Kassim were arrested and taken to Putrajaya police station for selling two purported controversial cartoon books by Zunar titled " Konspirasi Memenjarakan Anwar" and "Pirate of the Carry-BN". 44 copies of Zunar's cartoons book were again confiscated by the police and Zunar's assistant were all probed under Section 8(2) of the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984, Section 4(1)(c) of the Sedition Act 1948, and Section 500 of the Penal Code.

Soon after that, on 12 November 2014, Zunar was informed by the police to come forward for an investigation at Dang Wangi police station, under Section 4(1)(c) of the Sedition Act for allegedly publishing seditious content in his cartoon books. This is the second sedition investigation against Zunar. His webmaster, who has been managing his website and online bookstore, has been called by the police for investigation under the Sedition Act in the same day too.

The police's action went against the recent stand took by Court of Appeals. A month earlier, the Court of Appeal took an unanimous stand and lifted a ban imposed by Home Minister on two of Zunar's cartoon books Perak Darul Kartun and 1 Funny Malaysia on grounds that they were not a threat to national security or prejudicial to public order. In delivering his judgement, Justice Mohamad Ariff stated that the law should not be abused by executive and that public odium cannot be so conveniently equated with public order.

Nevertheless, the Home Ministry, on a letter dated 10 November 2014, informed Zunar and his lawyer that they are appealing at Federal Court to have the Court of Appeal's decision struck out, insisting that Zunar's cartoon satire is prejudicial to public order.

Under Article 10 of the Federal Constitution, our forefather has provided that every citizen has the right to freedom of speech and restriction is deemed necessary only if the act threatens the interest of national security, public order or morality that should be narrowly defined in line with international human rights law. For this, it goes against logic and common sense to hold that Zunar's cartoons political satire can be purported as detrimental to public order, morality and certainly not national security.

No one should be subjected to intimidation, criminalization and imprisonment for producing satirist cartoons which is a legitimate expression of political opinions through the form of art. Any reasonable reader would be mature and open-minded enough to draw a line between facts and jokes. The government is projecting itself as a repressive, tyrannical and narrow-minded leader by putting forward these unrelenting attacks on Zunar and his teams.

While the government refused to recognize and appreciate Zunar's work, in 2011, Zunar was conferred "Courage in Editorial Cartooning Award" by the Cartoonist Rights Network International, a cartoonists' rights NGO based in Washington, USA. And again in October 2014, one of Zunar's book, Pirate of the Carry-BN has been accepted into the Library of Congress in Washington.

Freedom of expression is a defining attribute of democratic states and political satire is a bellwether of the extend of openness of a country. As firm believer in rights to freedom of expression, Suara Rakyat Malaysia (SUARAM) is hereby calling the government to:

* Cease all harassment and investigation on Zunar, three of his assistants for Zunar's cartoons books and his webmaster.
* Stop intimidating printers, publishers, vendors and bookstore owners from partnering with Zunar.
* Lift ban on all Zunar's cartoon book and to return all confiscated books.
* Respect freedom of expression and repeal the Sedition Act.

That's also a decent summary of the case as far as I've come to understand, although granted I share the point of view of Zunar and this human rights organization and I admit the possibility that there could be information I don't have -- although I sort of doubt it's anything opinion-shaping.

Here's a short profile that notes the forthcoming visit Zunar has been asked to paid the police.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Perfect Pant

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: Autoptic On Give To The Max Day, Including A Power Hour 10-11 Central Time

The Minneapolis-based festival Autoptic returns this summer (new video here), and for one of their fundraisers is participating in Minnesota's Give To The Max Day. They want you to know that:

* All donations are tax deductible
* Power Hour is 10am to 11am Central Time, where all Give To The Max donations within this period will raise an additional $10 no matter the donation amount
* Autoptic will happen regardless of what we raise in 2015, but, everything we raise will go towards making the show a stronger and more important event

I think they're right there as an event and plan on attending in 2015.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Frazetta On Prayer

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Gill Hatcher

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: Shows And Events

By Tom Spurgeon

* Thought Bubble, Short Run and ICAF this weekend. I'll be at ICAF, talking to Jeff Smith and listening to bunches and bunches and bunches of smart people.

* I don't know if this is a show or a place near a show, but I want to go there.

* Chris Arrant caught something in this piece that I hadn't: Dan Vado getting APE back comes with plans for that show to embrace a wider variety of expressive media than its traditional comics focus.

* finally, RIPExpo exhibitor applications have gone live.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Pasadena, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Seattle, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Columbus, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Voids

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I'm on the road and have done my image-driven posts ahead of time. I therefore don't have a proper way to drive you towards this Mike Dawson comic, so I hope this mention here will do the job.

* Johanna Draper Carlson on Princess Ugg Vol. 1. Don MacPherson on The Charlton Arrow #1. J. Caleb Mozzocco on Fantastic Four Vol. 1. Richard Bruton on A Bunch Of Amateurs. Richmond Clements on Midnight Man. Sean Gaffney on Attack On Titan Vol. 14. John Kane on a bunch of different comics.

* Tony Millionaire draws a nice ship.

* how can you not be at least a little bit happier upon seeing this picture?

* the happiest I've ever been on reading a pull quote. I did indeed say that upon confronting that comic.

* finally, Ed Piskor digs up a couple of Crumb drawings of hip-hop artists.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Sara Ryan!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 67th Birthday, Doug Murray!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 11, 2014

Go, Look: Becca Tobin

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Zunar Releases Initial Statement On Latest Round Of Political Harassment Facing His Work

Zunar has sent along word that he is once again facing investigation by police, ostensibly for the act of creating and disseminating his cartoon work. He has been asked to report to authorities next week. One more person working with the cartoonist was brought into police orbit through a summons to appear. Last week, three assistants to the artist were arrested for selling the books Conspiracy To Imprison Anwar and Pirate Of The Carry-BN.

Zunar's initial statement, which looks to lead to a fuller statement and a press conference later this week:

"The police has open up new investigation against me under The Sedition Act.

"12 Nov 2014 (8 pm Malaysia time); I had received a call from police officer in Kuala Lumpur to inform that they are investigating me under The Sedition Act. I need to report to the police station next week. According to the officer the investigation is relating to my latest cartoon book, but he did not say which one.

"Earlier today, my webmaster who help me operating my official website, http://www.zunar.my/ was summon to the police station. Last week, there of my sale assistants were arrested for selling my latest cartoon books Conspiracy to Imprison Anwar and Pirate of The Carry-BN.

"I will call for press conference tomorrow and will issue a full statement after that."

This latest series of actions against the cartoonist began after he won a pretty substantial -- and some would say surprise -- court victory over an extensive period of harassment in 2010. We wish him every good fortune in whatever choices he makes in the weeks ahead. This link between fairly standard western-style editorial cartooning and sedition would be noxious without the timing vis-a-vis the final outcome of the 2010 case, and one hopes for the sake of his person and his country Zunar eventually prevails.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Personal Narrative

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: The Nib Has A Humorous Calendar That They Want To Sell You

Matt Bors sent all the usual suspects -- I'm supposing -- word of this campaign to do a calendar of obscure dates, marshaling many of the fine cartooning talents that have worked on Medium's The Nib over the last year.

I wanted to mention it here mostly because I like the look of the campaign, and I'm always on the lookout for ways that comics entities may employ the anticipation for material and the infrastructure of the on-line comics culture without traditional crowd-funding's inherent charitable impulses driving the car. Maybe this is a tool that could be used, or a campaign that might serve as a model. I'm not sure. Eventually, I assume, something will stick.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Art Of Alden Viguilla

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Seth Profiled In London, Ontario Paper

It's a good one and it's nice to see Seth recognized in the prime of his career. That's a hell of a photo, too. Above is a scan of the cover for the print edition sent over by Diana Tamblyn, who is a Seth fan as well.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

OTBP: Grace, Jerry, Jessica And Me

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

This Isn’t A Library: New And Notable Releases Into Comics’ Direct Market

OCT141659 STRONG FEMALE PROTAGONIST GN BOOK 01 (MR) $19.95
This is a collection from Top Shelf of a well-liked web strip that has more of a cultural take on a standard hero trope of wondering after how the real world and the fantasy state of superhero comics might co-exist.

AUG140435 LOCKE & KEY TP SLIPCASE SET HOLIDAY ED $99.99
Merry Christmas!

AUG140667 OUTCAST BY KIRKMAN & AZACETA #5 (MR) $2.99
SEP140763 WALKING DEAD #134 (MR) $2.99
SEP140768 WYTCHES #2 (MR) $2.99
AUG148449 THOR #1 2ND PTG DAUTERMAN VAR $3.99
SEP140857 THOR #2 $3.99
SEP148023 BATGIRL #35 2ND PTG $2.99
SEP140253 BATGIRL #36 $2.99
Those are two books written by Robert Kirkman up top. I try to read whatever Kirman does and Walking Dead is due to ramp up the insanity any day now. Wytches is the Scott Snyder book for Image,with the artist Jock. That gets interesting for the work, which is apparently quite good, and for its reaction, also said to be reasonably strong. After that you get mainstream works with well-known concepts experiencing some level of revision. The fact that both sold out is an endorsement of where those books are going, and good for all the creators involved.

SEP140981 BABY BLUES COLLECTION TP WETTER LOUDER STICKIER $18.99
This is the missing volume from last week's crush of high-client newspaper comics collections.

SEP141543 FOREVER SMURFETTE GN $5.99
SEP141544 FOREVER SMURFETTE HC $10.99
More Peyo; again at the two levels of entry.

SEP141618 GRAPHIC CANON OF CHILDRENS LITERATURE TP $38.95
I have no idea what's in this volume of the popular series, but I do that series was incredibly popular.

SEP141157 MOUSE GUARD BALDWIN BRAVE OTHER TALES HC $14.99
Still the most under-appreciated multiple series of the last two decades.

AUG141639 ZENITH HC PHASE ONE $25.00
I lost track of how this is being published and whether or not we should be happy about it, but I'm interested in the core Grant Morrison/Steve Yeowell work.

SEP141876 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS LIFE WRITING IN PICTURES SC $30.00
SEP141877 DAVE SIM CONVERSATIONS SC $30.00
SEP141878 HOWARD CHAYKIN CONVERSATIONS SC $30.00
Three solid, recent university-press comics history/resource volumes. I liked the Chaykin, and am in the Dave Sim. I think.

AUG141861 MAD GREATEST ARTISTS DON MARTIN 3 DECADES GRTEST WORK HC $30.00
I'm all for Don Martin, and I'm all for comedy institutions honoring their idiosyncratic contributors. It's hard to imagine what Don Martin was to MAD in terms of another artist and another medium.

AUG141862 SECRET HISTORY OF WONDER WOMAN HC $29.95
Advance word is good on what should be a massive seller for a book of its type; the Wonder Woman comics are really effective, particularly the early ones.

*****

The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.

To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.

The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.

If I failed to list your comic, that's because I hate you.

*****

*****
*****

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Jade Sarson

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In London, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were Near Baltimore, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In OKC, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Montreal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* J. Caleb Mozzocco on Megahex. Frederik Hautain on Drifter. Rob Clough on the comics of Beth Hetland and the comics of Reilly Hadden. Todd Klein on Swamp Thing Annual #3. Don Macpherson on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina #1 and Wytches #1. Johanna Draper Carlson on Kawaii Manga: Adorable. J. Caleb Mozzocco on Tales Of The TMNT #7.

* man, those frogs.

* this Independent Sources show on diversity in comics seems like it might be worth watching ahead of its appearance in next weekend's video parade.

* Chris Arrant talks to Aubrey Sitterson. Someone at Book Soup talks to Drew Friedman.

* finally, this round-table with creators from Above The Dreamless Dead includes its subjects Hanna Barry, James Lloyd and Kevin Huizenga. I always love to see Huizenga interviewed.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 62nd Birthday, Carl Potts!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 10, 2014

OTBP: The Hideous Dropping Of The Veil

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Russ Heath Pro-Hero Initiative Cartoon

You can read a Russ Heath cartoon (with Darwyn Cooke) about the help provided him by the Hero Initiative a bunch of places, including here. I think that's a great thing when it happens, when people out older artists in need. Our culture more widely and the very specific culture of comics sometimes has a hard time marshaling resources in that direction. I hope you'll consider making the Hero Initiative or specific campaigns for older creators a part of your giving routine.

One thing that's interesting to me is the above link chooses to couch the comics-maker's situation as the artist Roy Lichtenstein exploiting Heath rather than what occurs to me first: the industry in which Heath worked not providing him with great enough reward in a systemic way that affects dozens and dozens of esteemed creators.

Dylan Horrocks somewhere -- maybe Facebook -- reminded me of the posting by Craig Yoe of a cartoon about Lichtenstein provided him by Mort Walker.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Rise At Sundown

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Festivals Extra: ActuaBD.com Surveys Angouleme Exhibitions

I thought this article at the French-language clearing house for news ActuaBD.com most effective as a list of exhibitions: there will be a Jack Kirby show, a spotlight on Jiro Taniguchi and an exhibition featuring the work of Tove Jansson. There will also be a bunch of more modern shows on display, like one featuring Anouk Ricard. In a year I bet a significant number of people are considering a last minute push to go, just knowing what you're getting into might be useful.

The rest of it, it's harder for me to say. That doesn't sound like any more of a nostalgia-driven show than some of my memories of shows from years past, even though it's certainly true that the show has been pushing for a bigger, more crowd-pleasing relevancy the last few years. What seems like criticism that the Watterson poster didn't include Calvin and Hobbes despite those characters being the stars of the work for which Watterson was elected sounds silly to me considering the cartoonist's longtime stand against the use of those characters in advertising. Then again, it's hard for us to imagine choices like that involving a North American show poster having ramifications of any kind to the point they would be reported.

The last part of the article goes over a conflict between the Festival owners and the organizers hired to run the show through 2017, and other than noting that such a conflict may exist seems difficult to figure out absent being immersed in the players involved.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Jon Marchione

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: Two Post-CAB Sales Among A Potential Many

Both Box Brown and Oily Comics (use discount code POSTCAB) have announced post-Comic Arts Brooklyn sales today, Brown in part because of having to leave the event early.

It's a good week to check out your favorite independent comics-makers, doubly so if they were a part of CAB: after any big show in that community an artist might adjust their personal sales offers according to how much inventory they have left and the general health of their comics-making enterprise.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Control Room

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Dilraj Mann

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked: Publishing News

By Tom Spurgeon

* looks like Floating World has released a second publication via its micro-press imprint: Johnny Viable And His Terse Friends #1. I dream of a world where every comics entity has a micro-press imprint.

* was reminded while bouncing around the Internet that was going to be doing a kids' book with Robert Goodin. That's very good news no matter when, where or how you process it fully.

* Hayao Miyazaki isn't sure he'll be able to finish his samurai manga.

* I can't even imagine being a superhero comics reader and having to deal with something like soft relaunches pivoting on character development points. I think that would drive me bonkers.

* totally missed that we're getting a paperback version of the all-in-one Far Side collection. That's good news, in that that's fine work and as many formats get that into people's hands, I'm for.

* I missed this announcement for Roger Langridge working with the Mandrake The Magician character, and I'm not even sure I knew about a revival of any King comics.

* this article at CBR suggests that the popular mainstream writer Scott Snyder may take an extended sabbatical at some point.

* here's a look at several pages from the forthcoming Ulli Lust, a collaboration with Marcel Bayer.

* Chris Arrant digs into Fantagraphics' announcement they'll be publishing Eternonaut.

* whoa, new Megan Kelso mini-comic.

* a next round of mini-kus! comics is imminent.

* finally, I'm not sure why I didn't know this was at least imminent, but Frank Young has released the 1950s John Stanley bibliography.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In London, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Minneapolis, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Alison Sampson Original Art For Sale

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Bob Temuka says enough with the superheroes already. He also writes about five comics from 1975.

* Rob Clough is in the middle of his CCS graduates and students month, so expect this site to struggle in order to catch up with the links to those pieces. Right now you can read profiles/summary views of Chuck Forsman, Colleen Frakes and Sarah Wilson, Sean Ford and Amelia Onorato and Andrew Christensen, Stephanie Zuppo, Penina Gal and Melanie Gillman and a pair of surveys (1, 2) that contain more names than I'd like to type this morning. Clough always does a great job of engaging a lot of work at once, work that may or may not be familiar to you. Likely not.

* had fun yesterday enjoying a future episode of Virtual Memories podcast being made: Jules Feiffer.

* John Kane on a bunch of different comics. J. Caleb Mozzocco on Ms. Marvel. Paul O'Brien on X-Force Vol. 2. Joe Gordon on Arkham Asylum. Richard Bruton on Storm.

* finally, Sean Kleefeld looks at old comics-related jewelry.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 45th Birthday, James Owen!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 37th Birthday, Derek M. Ballard!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 38th Birthday, Steve Ekstrom!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 9, 2014

Go, Look: Leigh Luna

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Zunar Assistants Detained For Selling HIs Books; Those Arrested Do Not Include The Artist’s Wife

I missed out on the first part of the story that three sales assistants (two female) used by the Malaysian cartoonist Zunar were detained by authorities late last week for selling his books. I caught it here when it was made clear that one of those people was not his wife. Zunar's wife -- and I'll respect his desire not to have her named used in conjunction with this story -- was instrumental in representing her husband in public when he himself was detained a few years back.

In general, this story is heartbreaking and the action of authorities absurd. Zunar recently won a court decision about the international incident that was his own detention a few years back; for the cycle to begin in without any clear evidence of content that would incite strikes one more as political reprisal than public policy. I wish him all the best, and join the chorus of voices asking that Malaysian government representatives respect both common sense and previously established decisions of law.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: When Damo Met Can

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Amazon.com Picks Its Top Comics Of The Year; Roz Chast Secures The Best Of Year Slot

Mega-retailer Amazon has picked its top 20 graphic novels for 2014, and named Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast as its graphic novel of the year.

Their top 20 list, selected by editors at the giant retailer, in alphabetical order by title. You can go here to see the same list presented in descending order of sales.

* Andre the Giant: Life and Legend, Box Brown (First Second)
* Ant Colony, Michael DeForge (Drawn & Quarterly)
* Batman: A Visual History, Matthew K. Manning (foreword by Frank Miller) (DK Publishing)
* Beautiful Darkness, Fabian Vehlmann and Kerascoet, translated by Helge Dascher (Drawn and Quarterly)
* Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)

* Deadpool by Joe Kelly Omnibus, Joe Kelly and James Felder and Stan Lee and Ed McGuinness and Aaron Lopresti and Bernard Chang and Shannon Denton and Pete Woods and Rob Liefeld (Marvel)
* How To Be Happy, Eleanor Davis (Fantagraphics)
* Locke & Key: Alpha & Omega, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
* Saga Deluxe Edition Volume One, Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (Image)
* Seconds: A Graphic Novel, Bryan Lee O'Malley (Ballantine)

* Sugar Skull, Charles Burns (Pantheon)
* The Graveyard Book Graphic Novel: Volume Two HC, Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)
* The Harlem Hellfighters, Max Brooks (Broadway Books)
* The Love Bunglers, Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
* The Shadow Hero, Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew (First Second)

* The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances, The Oatmeal and Matthew Inman (Andrews McMeel)
* The Wrenchies, Farel Dalrymple (First Second)
* This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (First Second)
* Through the Woods, Emily Carroll (Margaret K. McElderry Books)
* Trillium, Jeff Lemire, (Vertigo/DC)

I always like this list because it's very, very different than my own. I suppose there's a chance that this recognition leads directly to sales through Amazon, although I've never heard of any huge success stories. It looks like the Chast may be on its way to becoming a near-consensus book of the year.

I haven't double-checked all of the end-of-year lists there, but I know that the Chast is in the 70s on the overall books list so I imagine some crossover. Mo Willems, Jon J Muth and Jules Feiffer have works on one of the kids lists. I'm sure I'm missing some and will update as I gain a bit more clarity.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

OTBP: Cats In Service

New Megan Kelso!

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Lizzy Stewart

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Comics By Request: People, Places In Need Of Funding

By Tom Spurgeon

* the saga of writer James Hudnall, who raised a few thousand dollars to get over the gap caused by hospitalization an amputation, takes a distressing turn as he now needs a new home. If you can give, please consider it, even if it's just a few dollars. That sounds awful, and a lot of comics people are in similarly risky positions in terms of what a change in their health could portend.

* my crappy grammar from a couple of weeks ago might have made it look like the cartoonist Melissa Mendes was somehow done seeking support on Patreon. She's not withdrawing anything, of course. I'm guessing she'd very much like as much support as possible. Please consider doing so.

* the author of this volume being collected wrote in to ask if there might be a line-item link in it for them. Who am I to refuse? One thing they mentioned is that this is a company that frequently does crowd-funders to publish, which is interesting in that I'm not sure I knew someone was doing that regularly.

* finally, Chris arrant takes a long look at Dan Vado's various crowd-funding efforts and the difficulty he's had in meeting various set goals.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In London, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: The Other Briony May Smith Site

we already got the Tumblr a few days ago

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Matthew Thurber's "Letter To A Young Cartoonist" contains several notions worth considering about the nature of on-line and social media use by comics-makers, even if you don't agree in any way with the thrust of the arguments. Although if you treat it as an argument to be defeated, I'm sure you'll be able to.

* Richard Burton on Star Cat Book One. Eric Margolis on She-Hulk.

* Heidi MacDonald takes note that there is something called the Goodreads Choice Awards, and that there's a comics category. I had two cartoonists tell me over the weekend that Goodreads is one of the few places they can routinely find negative reviews of their work, which strikes me as funny for some reason.

* I get that everyone in comics thinks they should be covered more, and has an idea of what that coverage should look like, but for curiosity's sake I did a quick search of articles that mentioned "Dave Sim" on this site and came up with a mere 28 in this calendar year. I'll try to do better.

* "Ragnarok" as a recurring plot device is funny because of the implied one-time nature of such an event -- even when you make it cyclical, the power of the word comes from its drastic, epoch-ending consequences.

* finally, Carla Hoffman's engages with what it's like to read event after overwhelming event in superhero comic books starts to feel like even for someone invested in those kinds of comics.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 40th Birthday, Chris Bolton!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 54th Birthday, Neil Gaiman!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 44th Birthday, James Sime!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 60th Birthday, Bruce Chrislip!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 8, 2014

Have Fun At Programming Day At Comics Art Brooklyn 2014

Comic Arts Brooklyn continues today with its first ever dedicated programming day, at the Wythe Hotel. It's a stellar line-up -- a good enough line-up I'd pay to see the moderators speak on their own -- and organizer Paul Karasik seems like a fine host. The Art Spiegelman/Roz Chast discussion is two Rushmore level comics talkers, and all by itself would be a day out.

Seating is limited, and much if not all of it has been secured via an Eventbrite reservations process. There will be standing people brought in as necessary to fill the space, which will be emptied event to event.

To be clear, there is no Expo portion in the big church today. Today is the programming day. I'm told there may have been some slight confusion, particularly in the days leading up to the show.

The Kutikuti event is today, too.

That's Al Jaffee from his Friday night signing, by Marc Arsenault of Alternative Comics. Thanks, Marc.

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Jordi Bernet Images Mini-Gallery

posted 5:00 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Halifax, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Vancouver, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Albany, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Tucson, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Leeds, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Peter Birkemoe!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 63rd Birthday, Bill Mantlo!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 53rd Birthday, Mort Todd!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 7, 2014

CAB Weekend Publishing News: Ryan Sands Unveils Youth In Decline’s 2015

Ryan Sands of the increasingly vital publisher Youth In Decline sent along his plans for a loaded 2015 in conjunction with today's Expo portion of the 2014 Comic Arts Brooklyn Festival.

He started by noting that in 2013 the publisher launched with two issues of what he terms the "monograph series" Frontier. In 2014 that lead to four issues of publication. In 2015, another four issues will be published. The featured artists will be Jillian Tamaki, Anna Deflorian, Becca Tobin and Michael DeForge. Covers above.

The line also has three books planned. Covers below. One is the previously-announced complete collection of the erotic comics anthology Thickness, which is a project that preceded the formation of Youth In Decline and something Sands did in partnership with the cartoonist Michael DeForge. The two new-material works are Dream Tube, coming from Rebekka Dunlap and RAV 2ND COLLECTION by Mickey Zacchilli, whose first work under that name was one of this year's SPX books of the show.

Sands also informed CR that they'd be re-doing their Frontier subscription offer that they ran in 2014. They'll be doing that December 1 and running it through February 14, 2015. That's where for a flat price, a reader can get all four issues sent along with a bunch of extra, subscriber-only goodies such as hand-pressed items and discounts for other Youth In Decline offerings. You can bookmark their web site for that, or follow their twitter account, and I'll try to remember to remind you here.

Other notes:

* the 32-page comic in Frontier #7 will be Jillian Tamaki's longest single-story to date, and is to be called SexCoven. They will debut that work at MoCCA in April and offer a print set.

* Anna Deflorian's Frontier #8 will be that series first female creator outside of North America. She lives and works in Italy and authored Roghi for Canicola. This will mark her first North American publication. That one comes out at TCAF in May.

* Scotland's Becca Tobin will be doing a series of stories for Frontier #9, to debut at SPX.

* a 32-page horror comic from Michael DeForge -- a "spiritual sequel" to DeForge's earlier comics "College Girl By Night" and "By Night" -- will make up the bulk of Frontier #10, planned for a debut at CAB 2015.

* as for the books, Sands notes that Dream Tube will be Rebekka Dunlap's first collection, and is planned for an SPX debut. The RAV book will collect issues #7-10 and feature some of the same design flourishes that made the first collection noteworthy -- that one should be out for CAB. When it finally appears, Thickness will be 250 pages including 50 pages of new comics. The collection will also include the pin-up posters from the original series. That one is set for earlier in the year, at TCAF.

Sands also noted that he hopes to have a few informally planned things out throughout the year: a t-shirt, a patch, maybe even a 'zine or two. He has started to work on a third issue of Electric Ant Zine, but no promises.

(Mr. Sands will be attending today's CAB show, and I imagine he'll be happy to take any questions on 2015 or the years preceding)

posted 7:00 pm PST | Permalink

A Few, Absolutely Last-Minute CAB 2014 Notes

* CAB 2015 is an hour away as I post. The pre-parties and satellite events so far have been well-reviewed and I believe without exception strongly attended. I went out last night and there was a real notion of being able to dip into different parts of the city for different kinds of events, which was fun.

* I've experienced some confusion about the two-day nature of the show: that one day (Saturday) is Expo-only the Church, and one day (Sunday) is set aside for programming at the Wythe Hotel. Some folks -- all of whom have since said they've learned what's up -- initially thought a two-day show meant two days at the Church selling books. Please forgive me for not making that a stronger point of emphasis in my reportage. I'm super-excited to see how this format works out.

* the cartoonist Katie Skelly won't be able to attend the show due to a death in the family. It'd be nice if this emerging Queens-based cartoonist and Brooklyn/NYC show stalwart of recent years was able to sell out of her adults-only Agent 8 book -- collecting pieces that ran on-line at Slutist. It's pictured above. Taline Alexander is going to be manning Skelly's table. I'm looking forward to seeing Skelly's first full-color book, and I hope people will pay special attention to it given Skelly's unfortunate absence.

* finally, I've heard the usual tales of cartoonists working up to the last second on books, including three different Friday trips to various area copy stores. One teacher of comics told me Friday's class was going to be about "stapling and folding mini-comics," which made me laugh. So get there early. It should be a fun show.

posted 6:00 pm PST | Permalink

The Comics Reporter Video Parade

Memories Of 2013: Tom Bunk Profiled

Short Documentary On Texas Comic Book Store Owners

Profile Of Well-Received Canadian Parliamentary Shooting Cartoon

Her Life As An Aspiring Cartoonist

Commercial For Minimum Wage

Opening Night At The Recent Columbia University Exhibition

posted 4:00 pm PST | Permalink

CR Week In Review

The top comics-related news stories from November 1 to November 7, 2014:

1. A cartoon compares Benjamin Netanyahu's policies to the actions of 9/11 terrorists. There's some pushback.

2. Bill Watterson drew a new cartoon for the poster of this year's Angouleme Festival; he won't be attending despite being this year's president.

3. Comic Arts Brooklyn, the last big event of the festival calendar in terms of the traditional schedule favored by small-press and alt/arts publishers (there's a new event starting this year in Los Angeles and scattered events of many a kind), gets underway via satellite event and publishing announcement.

Winner Of The Week
Jim Woodring

Losers Of The Week
All those hoping that the Angouleme presidency might drive Bill Watterson into a public appearance. I think a lot of people would like a chance to shower Bill Watterson with applause somehow.

Quote Of The Week
"... if all this sounds like an apology, let me assure you; IT IS NOT AN APOLOGY." -- Zak Sally

posted 3:40 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: JH Williams III Image Mini-Galleries

1, 2

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Brooklyn, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Milwaukee, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In London, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Tucson, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Halifax, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Cheese Hasselberger!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 6, 2014

CAB Weekend Publishing News: AdHouse Books Announces Spring 2015 Schedule

Chris Pitzer's AdHouse Books has announced three book for its Spring 2015 season. They are:

* The Oven, Sophie Goldsten (April 2015)
* Russian Olive To Red King, Kathryn & Stuart Immonen (May 2015)
* Pope Hats #4, Ethan Rilly (June 2015)

That seems like a potentially strong season. Sophie Goldstein's House Of Women was an Ignatz winner so there should be some anticipation as to the follow-up. The Immonens may be better known for their individual mainstream comics gigs, but they're dedicated to their small press work, all of which has been accomplished. Ethan Rilly's Pope Hats comics will be in much the same format as the previous, extremely well-received issues.

There's a page on the AdHouse site for Goldstein's book: here. Goldstein herself is here. The Immonens have a web presence here and Ethan Rilly is here.

posted 10:35 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Briony May Smith

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

CAB Weekend Publishing News: Koyama Press Announces Partnership With Sequential

Koyama Press via press release this morning announced that they will be launching a significant number of their comics and graphic novels as digital edition via Sequential. They'll do a sale this weekend to launch the new partnership. They promise some work that has been out of print, so that's always interesting. What's also interesting is how smaller publisher make these kinds of decisions in the first place -- it's not always about going to one service or another but finding the right fit.

The press release promises future batches of comics being made available; I'll re-examine the deal in the light of initial launches when those become clear tomorrow. Sequential already works with a full array of North American independent publishers, including Top Shelf and Fantagraphics.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

OTBP: Raconteur #5

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Chris Ware On This Week’s New Yorker Cover

Here. I always enjoy reading anything Ware writes.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Spa Fon? Squa Tront!

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

A Very Few Words On James Sturm’s Sponsor Comic

So the cartoonist and educator James Sturm did a comic for The Nib about a young white male cartoonist and an older white male cartoonist working through some basic career neuroses in the form of a steps-program sponsor relationship. The instigating factor for this crisis of faith in first the younger, then the older cartoonist is the success enjoyed by an even younger cartoonist who is female and is good at Kickstarter. This allows the comic to be seen in a way that allows for a very specific gender-conscious critique of white men fearful of the other (female cartoonists). I think that point of view was first offered up in this Colleen Frakes tweet. It's been explored by writers like Sarah Horrocks and Heidi MacDonald.

I've e-mailed James to see if he wants to respond to the rolling conversation -- maybe he has somewhere -- and if he sends something, I'll run it.

My own reaction is kind of all over the place. I thought it was pretty clearly satire, like I don't know how that ridiculous set-up with a sponsor and the person he's sponsoring and the whole exaggeration of it isn't wholly indicative of that. It's not satire like Jonathan Swift (let's eat babies) or Randy Newman (fuck short people) where something is exposed as awful by making a ridiculous and directly false and untenable statement in over-the-top fashion. It seems to me more like Archie Bunker, where someone's extreme reactions to something is clownish and exposes the absurdity of how that reaction has been shaped, while at the same time we might have some sympathy in that what they're reacting to are fears and frailties that are recognizable to us. The Lisa Kudrow show The Comeback seems to me to work in the same way.

So it makes perfect sense to me that some people might find something of themselves in the idea that people younger than them are succeeding where they're not, just as I can't fathom that anyone would look at the two clownish shit-heads in that comic and think that clinging to such thoughts as a primary worldview is something to be endorsed. Then again, a bunch of people thought Archie Bunker a hero, straight-up.

MacDonald's piece floats the interesting notion that the use of a female "nemesis" in the cartoon was just a signifier for "young," which I suppose could be the case. I know from talking to Editor Matt Bors that the critical reading that has developed didn't occur to him while he was going through it -- I hope he doesn't mind me saying so. But I also sort of think the piece is stronger if these sad assholes are so clueless so as to not be aware of, or are helplessly processing without meaning to, the obvious gender issues involved.

The only thing I know I don't agree with is a reading that's interested in James Sturm's intentions and believes they correspond to ideas expressed by cartoon characters to the point at which it's asserted that it's a hit piece on one cartoonist or another and these cartoonists' names are actually tossed out there. That just seems like a super-cynical reading to me to the point of absurdity, although clearly the old guy is the late Stan Goldberg. Okay, I'm just kidding. Although maybe not.

Update: James Sturm got back to CR. "Probably best for the piece to speak for itself."

posted 9:50 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Mort Meskin-Drawn Boys’ Ranch Story

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Assembled, Zipped, Transferred And Downloaded: News From Digital

By Tom Spurgeon

* Mark Waid and John Rogers have secured a line-wide print publishing deal for their Thrillbent line with IDW. I think a print deal with quality participants is good for an on-line effort: it increases the reach, monetizes some material that may not have been monetized when it was digital and actually makes people think of the contrast between the two avenues for publication.

* this might be more appropriate to the "Bundled" or "By Request" columns, but it looks like this Digital Manga project revolving around Osamu Tezuka-related projects has stalled in a significant way. It was a criticized from a variety of standpoints.

* Anime News Network has run the press release regarding Viz's recently announced digital content expansion.

* finally, Brigid Alverson talks to Sam Costello about the horror site Split Lip.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Brooklyn, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Brooklyn, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Madison, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Halifax, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Uncle Geo Washington Bings

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell hit Columbus, Ohio to do some research. Lot of photos of the reading room space at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in this one.

* Jerry Smith names his top ten favorite comics writers.

* Alex Dueben talks to Michel Fiffe.

* Paul Gravett does his usual survey of a month in graphic novels, this time January 2015.

* Abhay Khosla very briefly on L'Ermite and Maggy Garrison. The Bookworm Baby on The Dinner That Cooked Itself. Chris Hedges on Bumf. Danielle Riendeau on In Real Life.

* Holy Christ On Planet Earth, Fantagraphics is debuting a bunch of stuff and providing a bunch of sneak peek sales at Comic Arts Brooklyn.

* finally, Chris Butcher notes a call for proposals from the Queers & Comics -- LGBTQ Cartoonists and Comics Conference, which I infer from how Butcher presents it is brand-new. Wait, he actually says up front it's a first-year event; I can't read anymore.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 47th Birthday, Dave Cooper!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 28th Birthday, Lizz Hickey!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 5, 2014

Go, Look: Eric Benton

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled Extra: Zak Sally Wants You To Buy Recidivist #4, But Know What You’re Getting

The cartoonist, festival organizer, musician and all-around positive comics life force Zak Sally is offering up the fourth issue of his Recidivist up for sale. The way he's doing so is an extension of its very hands-on creation, as Sally declines to give a print run (it's far less than 2500) and talks up the intentionality of a lot of the work that he feels might be misinterpreted by potential readers.

I don't know anyone in comics that has made more interesting choices in how to make comics than Sally has over the last six or seven years, and I think everything he does is worthy of our attention. I hope you'll consider it.

a part of the cover

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Nicholas And Edith

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Wang “Rebel Pepper” Liming Settles Into Japan

The Chinese cartoonist Wang Liming, who has over the last five years as "Rebel Pepper" become a popular cartoonist in China due to cartoons critical of the current regime and the subsequent attempt to deny him a platform for that work, has indeed stayed in Japan. Last CR checked in on Liming in August, this was one of many options he had. This last summer Liming found himself surveying the situation potentially facing him on his return to his home country as a wave of censure-style criticism of his work had erupted while he was abroad traveling. It turns out he did stay in Japan, and with the help of some of his friends has secured employment.

It seems so out of touch with the times for us to see this kind of open state-sponsored hassling of artists and cartoonists, but that -- and much worse -- is a living reality for a number of world cartoonists. The number of social media platforms out there through which such work can be disseminated has made these comics almost impossible to fully contain but also has exposed the artists involved a bit more than they used to be, too. We wish the cartoonist success and happiness in his new life, and a future, beneficial outcome with things back home.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Gay Manga Tumblr

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: A Kelly Dale GoFundMe Reminder

This is a short reminder that Kelly Dale, the wife of the recently deceased independent comics artist Jeremy Dale, is the beneficiary of a GoFundMe campaign started to help her through some of the financial aspects of this tragic period. I hope you'll consider giving, particularly if you were a fan of the late artist's work.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Joe Sacco Interviewed About The Great War

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: The Beat On New DC Comics Job Openings

Heidi MacDonald over at The Beat caught something I didn't: the forthcoming move to Burbank from New York City for the rest of DC Publishing has led to several job postings. They're are as scary and as jargon-heavy as you might imagine, which is always funny given the roots of comics publishing as the kind of job where you can smell the ink in the offices -- it wasn't really that long ago, and a lot of publishers still operate basically that way.

One reason I wanted to pull that article out, though, is I think there's potential for immense change in that country's culture moving from one coast to another, even though it's not guaranteed. While there are always going to be people interested in working in comics publishing, connected to a big media enterprise or not, I would have to think that there's a kind of person gravitating to Los Angeles that's different than those that end up in New York. The percentage of hires that come from a slightly different, more geographically determined pool could be intriguing.

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Shtetl, My Destroyed Home

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

The Never-Ending, Four-Color Festival: Shows And Events

By Tom Spurgeon

* this weekend is CAB: the satellite events and party-type gatherings are already underway.

* both CAB and its predecessor BCGF have been great buying convention, for a lot of reasons. You get this great combination of stuff that's out because it didn't get done for SPX, stuff that was done to enhance the offerings someone had at SPX, and a bunch of end-of-year, cleaning-out-figurative-closet material. And then you get the Christmas books.

* my advice for anyone in attendance on Saturday is to do as much advance work as possible in terms of what your favorite cartoonists will have and march right up and buy that stuff immediately in order of desire. Then and only then do a slow walk around both rooms. Many of the cartoonist only have what they can carry over; many of the cartoonists won't exhibit again until April 2015.

* also: enjoy the neighborhood. Without programming on the day of the Expo portion, there's a chance to use that entire neighborhood as your other place to hang out between dives into the maelstrom. Dip in and out, if you can; have lunch.

* I also suggest doing as many of the other events this week that hold your interest, including the second formal day (if there are still eventbrite tickets), which is made up of panel programming. There are a lot of amazing cartoonists in the New York area and since nearly every one of them seems fond of CAB they tend to come out in droves. It's a good weekend to join them. We're at a really interesting time in comics and there is no better group of artists in any art form in terms of being on a stage and being smart and funny and interesting.

* I don't have a full range of recommendations for books to buy at the show, but Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague-Cash having a new Bow-Wow book promises to be fun; from the other end of things, Katie Skelly should have a collection of color comics from her Slutist comic Agent 8. As far as publishers having book debuts, there's Earthling by Aisha Franz (D+Q), the Emily Carroll issue of Frontier from Youth In Decline, UR by Eric Haven (AdHouse), and then both Arsene Schrauwen by OIivier Schrauwen and Vapor by Max (Fantagraphics).

* I'm forgetting a billion others. Like I said, great buying show.

* I was sent a link to this photo array from this Fall's New York Comic Con and promptly lost it, so I didn't get it up in the Collective Memory in time for anyone to see it.

* here are photos from the John P., Marnie Galloway and Edie Fake opening/panel presentation at Harper College.

* many a cartoonist has let me know they are totally intimidated by Sarah McIntyre's hat game.

* a convention in Rhode Island suffered from overcrowding.

* finally, Ron Marz writes at length about his trip to India for a comics show. There's nothing I love more than some of the veteran creators getting to experience some of the newer, interesting things about comics right now.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Montreal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Bunch Of George Lichty

1, 2

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Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Sherlock Holmes is officially in the public domain and I officially really don't understand stuff like public domain.

* Todd Klein on Astro City #15.

* Seattle is a city of literature because Fantagraphics.

* there are several fun comics to be read in this Grant Morrison-related comiXology sale: We3, Seaguy, Doom Patrol... I think I liked every comic listed except that Kid Eternity one. The one they're showing when I write this may not even be a Grant Morrison one, but I didn't like Morrison's, either.

* Jonah Weiland talks to James Robinson. Michael Bradley talks to Rian Hughes.

* Gary Tyrrell takes a brisk walk through the dominance of Raina Telgemeier and Kazu Kibuishi on the paperback graphic novels list, and muses on how great it is that reader of a certain age have fine comics over which to claim personal, immediate ownership.

* as we all know, "Paste Pot Pete" is a wonderful name for a comic book character: it's memorable, distinctive, weird and menacing.

* congratulations to Mike Sterling, who reports from Day One of his new store, a soft opening rather than a big party. He's an experienced comics retail manager, so how he approaches his store is likely to be a bit different from those that might come over to comics retail from other industries. I'm sure I'll enjoy whatever he wants to tell us about this experience.

* finally, Howard Chaykin holds forth at a convention. It's fun to read even a report of Chaykin expressing his opinions on things.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Gregory Mardon!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Jeremy Dale, RIP

posted 12:30 am PST | Permalink

By Request Extra: GoFundMe Established For Kelly Dale In Wake Of Jeremy Dale’s Passing

I am just now catching up to news of the artist Jeremy Dale's sudden passing. He was the creator of Skyward, a well-liked fixture at a few cons we both attended and very, very young. Our condolences to his fans, friends and family.

There is a GoFundMe for his wife Kelly Dale established to help get her through this difficult period. Please consider giving.

posted 12:25 am PST | Permalink

November 4, 2014

CR Newsmaker Interview: Chip Mosher

Back in September, I became interested in the comiXology Submit program for self- and small publishers as it was being promoted at Small Press Expo (SPX). I took the time to ask questions of CR readership about the program, and spoke to a ton comics-makers on the floor about their perceptions of and experiences with Submit.

Chip Mosher at comiXology (pictured left, on the SPX floor in 2013) agreed to take questions from me about what I heard.

His catching the worst case of post-con flu I've ever seen and my subsequent health snafus have delayed the publications of this piece until now, where I figure it will have some renewed relevance in proximity to Comic Arts Brooklyn (CAB). -- Tom Spurgeon

*****

TOM SPURGEON: So how did you guys conceive of going through SPX in terms of a sponsorship and your presence there as a way of promoting Submit?

CHIP MOSHER: SPX is one of the best and longest running shows in the mini-comics/self-publishing scene and the Ignatz Awards does a great job of spotlighting talent in that part of our industry, so linking up with SPX and the Ignatz Awards felt like a perfect match for Submit. There are a lot of books sold at SPX that were not available on comiXology before we sponsored last year -- books from the likes of Oily Comics, Retrofit, Andrea Tsurumi, Alternative Comics. Outside Alternative Comics, everyone listed above came on our platform through comiXology Submit.

SPURGEON: What was the difference between year one and year two on the ground?

MOSHER: At comiXology, our mission is to make everyone on the face of the planet a comic book fan and part of fulfilling that mission is to have the most diverse offering of comic books and graphic novels we possibly can. It's why we launched Submit -- to ensure that level of diversity -- and it's why we decided to sponsor the Ignatz Awards. Since our sponsorship at SPX last year, we've certainly seen a great influx of incredible material from the people that attend and exhibit at the show.

SPURGEON: Did the move into a relationship with Amazon.com make things different at all perception-wise?

MOSHER: Not at all. During the show this year, we were able to debut this page up on Amazon.com promoting the Ignatz nominees. People at the show who saw the page were really excited about the breadth of support of our sponsorship across both comiXology and Amazon ecosystems.

SPURGEON: For that matter, was there anything at all that changed with the Submit program because of that business deal?

MOSHER: Not significantly. The Submit deal is a non-exclusive deal, with a 50/50 profit split and a five-year commitment. Payments to the creators happen every fiscal quarter. In the past we used to have a $100 threshold for royalty payments, but now if you are set up with direct deposit, there is no threshold. For international creators, it's a little bit more complex depending on where you are based, but that's all spelled out on our FAQ here.

We're dedicated to Submit and you can expect it to continue to evolve with an eye towards making comiXology Submit better for our customers and better for creators and cartoonists.

SPURGEON: Before I get into the questions that came to me from other people, let me ask you a state of Submit questions and let you brag a bit if you want to. Do you have anything to report on how the bundle did? How did SPX participants in Submit do? Tell me about placing SPX on an Amazon.com front page and what effect that has.

MOSHER: We're very happy with how our curated SPX bundle performed and with how all our SPX related merchandizing did. We were excited for the opportunity to bring a "taste" of SPX to people around the globe that might not ever attend the show or be exposed to this type of comics and graphic novels. And our customers were excited as well.

SPURGEON: The first question I got back from people made me laugh, but it was almost a half-dozen folks that asked this: "Why?" And what they meant in every case is why they should bother to participate in the program. That strikes me now, though, as an excellent question. What's the basic pitch. Who is your best-case example? Is there a Robert Kirkman of the Submit program?

MOSHER: When work debuts on Submit, creators and cartoonists can instantly access a worldwide audience. It's a fantastic way for them to get their work out in to the world and for customers to have access to the most diverse material anywhere.

In 2013, the first year of Submit, we debuted Joshua Fialkov's and Joe Infurnari's The Bunker on Submit and it went on to become our top selling Submit comic book. Oni Press later picked up The Bunker for print distribution and it's currently an ongoing series at Oni Press.

Becky Cloonan put up her mini-comics and was a close second to The Bunker in the top selling list during the first year of the program. While both Josh and Becky have a big following in mainstream comics, their work with Submit was more in the spirit of SPX -- meaning it was more independent, more individual to their visions. Seeing those kinds of comics become wildly popular says a lot about the potential audience for work that might be considered off the beaten path.

SPURGEON: The second-most asked question was about the concerns some folks had who have already participated with some books have had concerning the grueling length of time it can take to work one's way through the program. Why does it take so long, Chip? Is there something being done to speed up the process?

MOSHER: When we launched Submit, the response was overwhelming. ComiXology co-founder and Director of Submit John D. Roberts and his team have been working hard to drop the wait time, and streamline the submission process. While common file issues like artifacting and pixilation can slow down the process, currently, if you submit a PDF and there are no file problems, it takes about 6 to 8 weeks to get released. We encourage any one submitting to please take a look at our guidelines page before they do so to make sure the review process is as smooth as possible.

There is just nothing like Submit out there in the marketplace in that we curate all submissions for file quality and quality of content.

SPURGEON: Talk to me about the digital/check minimum. My understanding is that in reaction to people concerned with there being a $100 minimum for a check to be disbursed, any amount made can be disbursed if there's a direct deposit option?

MOSHER: As I mentioned before, one recent change we made is that if you choose direct deposit as your royalty payment option, there is no $100 threshold. This is different for creators and cartoonists outside the U.S. depending on where you are based.

SPURGEON: Can you encompass all formats? All sizes? Is there anything different about getting a downloaded work that's in a non-traditional format in terms of the reading experience involved?

MOSHER: We can encompass pretty much anything any creator or cartoonist throws at us. I'm really excited that we have work by Warren Craghead through Submit, which is certainly not traditional in form.

Also, when something like Andrea Tsurumi's Andrew Jackson Throws A Punch comes through the system -- which in its print form has a multi-page pullout -- we can take that submission out of the queue and work directly with the cartoonist to create a Guided View Native version that is respectful to the artistic intent of the original work. We're actually still working with Andrea on this book and it should be out soon. It's really something.

SPURGEON: What are your policies about extreme content? How are they facilitated and enforced? Are you interested in a wide range of material, some of it potentially upsetting? What do I do if I'm a creator that has extreme material or what might potentially set off some of the more conservative alarms out there?

MOSHER: If you look at our Submit catalog, you can see that we carry a little bit of everything and we strive to have a catalog that has something for everyone. And while we don't see Submit as the "go to" place for extreme content, we do have a selection of work that would be considered extreme. My advice to anyone thinking of submitting content is to do it!

SPURGEON: From what I've read people writing to me, comiXology doesn't really afford a way to sort directly by creator without a lot of extra noise the way it provides those browsing opportunities for publisher, title and I think character. is that coming? Because a lot of these minis depend on being sold to drive attention to the that creator.

MOSHER: It's definitely possible to browse by creator on our site and creators and cartoonists can easily promote their creator page link to their fans. People can find the creator section in the "Browse" tab on the top-level navigation of our website and apps. For instance, Andrea Tsurumi's creator page is here.

Creators can contact us directly on social media about updating their creator page info.

SPURGEON: How does one get to participate in promotions like the bundle? Are those opportunities available to everyone?

MOSHER: Yes. For the SPX Bundle, we reached out to all the people participating in Submit via email and asked if they were attending SPX. From there, we curated the bundle based on responses to that email. More and more, we're conducting similar promotions for Submit with different focuses each time to promote as many Submit titles as possible.

SPURGEON: How does one not get lost amidst the massive wave after wave of material you're uploading?

MOSHER: The first step is to make your comic, the second is to get it on comiXology Submit, the third is promote, promote, and promote. Every entry on comiXology has a link that can be used to promote that book or book on social media. And having that dedicated link where your work is available 24/7 is a great resource for creators and cartoonists to share with as many people as possible.

We also offer a few additional features as part of being in the Submit program. We send out review copies every week to select press contacts; we also feature the books each week with dedicated prime real estate on the comiXology platform as well as in the weekly comiXology newsletter that promotes that week's Submit books. We also have a dedicated monthly email spotlighting the best of what Submit released that month.

SPURGEON: What should our expectations be going in? Say I'm a small press comics creator with six comics, standard sized. I'd like to try Submit, but I don't want to continue with it if I'm wasting my time. What is a decent threshold number for a comic like that? Ten sales? 200? What's the best seller?

MOSHER: We've had people sell thousands of copies and we've had people sell one or two copies. People have told me they've paid their rent with money from Submit. Or they were able to work on more comics with the money they made from Submit. It's great to offer our customers such diverse comics from the program and at the same time be able to support the creation of more diverse work

SPURGEON: What's the key to speaking successfully at the Ignatzes?

MOSHER: Make sure you speak last. [Spurgeon laughs]

*****

* photo of Mosher
* appropriate samples of art from Jillian Tamaki, Becky Cloonan and Andrea Tsurumi
* logo for Submit program

*****

*****
*****

posted 10:35 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Kingdom Animalia, Illustrated—Part Four

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Kingdom Animalia, Illustrated—Part Three

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Kingdom Animalia, Illustrated—Part Two

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Kingdom Animalia, Illustrated—Part One

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

This Isn’t A Library: New And Notable Releases Into Comics’ Direct Market

SEP140551 HUMANS #1 (MR) $2.99
SEP140049 USAGI YOJIMBO SENSO #4 $3.99
SEP140256 GRAYSON #4 $2.99
JUL140586 VELVET #8 (MR) $3.50
These are the comic-book comics that caught my interest. The Tom Neely-drawn Humans series gets off to its formal start after an unofficial #0 last summer. I look forward to seeing the new issue. I always look at and usually buy anything Usagi Yojimbo-related, although I haven't been in a comic book store since this first one started coming out. The minute I am, though... Grayson is a well-liked comic from DC. I don't see it from the couple of issues I've seen, but I'm hardly the best judge of that kind of material. Velvet is the Ed Brubaker/Steve Epting collaboration about an older female spy, and it's about to kick into a really high gear.

JUL140114 BOB POWELL COMPLETE CAVE GIRL HC $49.99
JUN141293 WALT KELLY POGO COMP DELL COMICS HC VOL 02 $60.00
It's another odd week for me at the comic shop in that there's a lot of material of interest just maybe not a ton of books that hold a surpassing interest where I'm concerned. I love looking at Bob Powell's old comics, although it never occurred to me that a complete Cave Girl volume would ever exist, let alone if I'd want one. I love looking at comic-book era Walt Kelly, too, although that price point might keep me that material for a while.

JUL140103 NEW YORK FOUR DARK HORSE ED TP $19.99
This is Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly, part of what I believe was Dark Horse picking up a bunch of Brian Wood-written projects over which he had publishing control after initial deals expired. This one is about a young woman learning to live in New York as a freshman at NYU; like most of the projects I imagine it's aimed less at people that age than to younger readers who wonder what that age could be like.

JUL140431 WORST OF EERIE PUBLICATIONS HC $27.99
Great title, anyway.

JUN140715 MARVEL 75TH ANNIVERSARY OMNIBUS HC $99.99
I don't have any idea what this upon first glance. Let me go look. Oh, it's 75 comics chosen from the company's 75-year publishing. I bet my list would be different than theirs, but I bet their list will be better than I might dread it is when I'm in a bad mood. I'd certainly take a look at it on the shelves, even though the price tag is out of my range.

SEP140594 KINSKI TP $14.99
Gabriel Hardman is a well-respected comic book illustrator, and deservedly so. This series about a man trying to save a dog no matter what that he both wrote and drew received a lot of praise when it appeared in serial form on-line through Monkeybrain. The nice thing about this is that you can sample an issue before you jump on board.

AUG148384 MEN OF WRATH BY JASON AARON #1 2ND PTG GARNEY VAR (MR) $3.50
SEP140913 MEN OF WRATH BY JASON AARON #2 (MR) $3.50
JUL140281 WAKE HC (MR) $24.99
The two projects most mistaken for Image Comics projects are Jason Aaron/Ron Garney's Men Of Wrath and the Scott Snyder/Sean Murphy effort The Wake. The former has a new issue out and the latter a hardcover collection. I have no exposure to Men Of Wrath as of yet, although I like many of the comics written by Jason Aaron just fine. The Wake comics seemed really slow pace-wise in serial form that I imagine might work much better in collection.

SEP141176 ADVENTURE TIME ORIGINAL GN VOL 04 BITTER SWEETS $12.99
One of these times one of these Adventure Time books is going to be the one I read to try and figure out Adventure Time comics.

JUL140419 SUPERMAN GOLDEN AGE SUNDAYS 1946-1949 HC $49.99
Superman comics are weird in that there are very few specific stories to have in one's libraries but all sorts of interesting periods from which to have samples. The newspaper comic material is one of the more important conceptions of the character in terms of hammering him into the public consciousness, and it's not a bunch of comics I've even seen.

SEP141506 ART SCHOOLED GN $22.95
This is Jamie Coe, and I think might be a first book-length work although maybe there's been a smaller collaborative project that comes close.

SEP141478 ATTACK ON TITAN GN VOL 14 $10.99
SEP141755 BLEACH GN VOL 62 $9.99
SEP141737 ALL YOU NEED IS KILL 2IN1 MANGA GN $14.99
Similarly to this week's superhero comic-book formatted comics, these three books strike me as popular, well-produced, action-adventure manga in accessible format. I'm not sure I'd buy these at all in a comics shops just from a shift in my interest, but I bet 16 year old me would try to guy all three.

MAY141466 BEATLES WITH AN A HC (KNOCKABOUT) (MR) $19.95
At first I thought that this was "Beatles with an MC," but it's actually a loose re-telling of the Beatles' earliest days as told by Mauri Kunnas, whose work I've never seen before now. It looks fun, though, I'd certainly check it out. That is one of the great arts stories of the 20th Century, particularly if you exclude those where the devil is involved.

AUG140979 GET FUZZY TP YOU CANT FIGHT CRAZY $14.99
AUG140980 MUTTS TREASURY LIVING THE DREAM SC $19.99
AUG140981 PEARLS BEFORE SWINE TP BREAKING STEPHAN $14.99
SEP140983 ZITS TREASURY TP PEACE LOVE & WI FI $18.99
This has to be about 60 to 80 percent of the really solid, well-regarded performers on the newspaper comics page right now, all with books out on the same day. If I had a newspaper, I'd have all of these strips on my Sunday pages.

JUL140113 GRANDVILLE NOEL HC $19.99
This series is already up to its fourth volume, which means I'm at least one behind. The material I've read was fun, though, and interesting visually, so I'll catch up sooner rather than later. I'm glad to see Bryan Talbot so relatively prolific these days.

*****

The full list of this week's releases, including some titles with multiple cover variations and a long, impressive list of toys and other stuff that isn't comics, can be found here. Despite this official list there's no guarantee a comic will show up in the stores as promised, or in all of the stores as opposed to just a few. Also, stores choose what they carry and don't carry so your shop may not carry a specific publication. There are a lot of comics out there.

To find your local comic book store, check this list; and for one I can personally recommend because I've shopped there, albeit a while back, try this.

The above titles are listed with their Diamond order code in the first field, which may assist you in finding comics at your shop or having them order something for you they don't have in-stock. Ordering through a direct market shop can be a frustrating experience, so if you have a direct line to something -- you know another shop has it, you know a bookstore has it -- I'd urge you to consider all of your options.

If I failed to list your comic, that's because I hate you.

*****

*****
*****

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Stuart Taylor

posted 9:50 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Rob Salkowitz On The Fragility Of The Comics Culture And Its Attendant Economy

Here. I don't think I agree with Rob on this one, although I'm not sure why beyond a hunch that it's the difference between those two cultures that's in play as much as any overlap. I'm sure something just as awful could be developed, though.

posted 9:45 pm PST | Permalink

OTBP: The Deep Ones

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Bill Watterson Provides Comic-Strip Poster To Angouleme; Makes It Official He Won’t Attend

Better view and short interview here. I knew that Watterson had done a poster -- that isn't automatic -- but I wasn't aware that it would be its own comic strip. Watterson was elected the president of next year's show by a new process reasonably far removed from the "past winners in a room" scenario, which some folks claimed led to an insular line-up of presidents.

In the interview, Watterson says he won't be going -- a version of the well-received Billy Ireland show will be the exhibition of his work -- and points out that he didn't use Calvin and Hobbes for the poster because he doesn't use them to advertise other things, and that includes comics.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Toronto, I’d Go To This

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If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Whenever I’m Sad I Think Of Doctor Dill Riding His Bicycle And Things Get Better

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Alex Hoffman (I think) on Fish. Dominic Umile on The Lonesome Go. Kelly Thompson on Saga #24. J. Caleb Mozzocco on In Real Life and Moon Knight Vol. 1. George Elkind on J.1137. Rob Clough on White Cube. Patrick Hess on Afterlife With Archie. Alex Hoffman on The Understanding Monster Vol. 2. Jeet Heer on The Secret History Of Wonder Woman.

* not comics: that's a nice-looking print by Jim Rugg.

* Albert Ching talks to Charles Soule. Michael Rapoport talks to Kelly Sue DeConnick. Tim Hodler talks to Charles Burns. Pablo Guerra talks to Manuele Fior. Cynthia Rose profiles Nine Antico. Hayley Campbell talks to Tom Oldham and Simon Hacking.

* I almost forgot to go look at Sean Kleefeld's year posting of Halloween strips -- he does that for a lot of holidays, actually.

* no argument here.

* not comics: a music video directed by Juanjo Guarnido, caught by Kevin Melrose.

* finally, I'm not always the one to click on these kinds of commentary series, but the cover chosen here is indeed a fine-looking cover.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 43rd Birthday, Diana Tamblyn!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 58th Birthday, Robert Loren Fleming!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 50th Birthday, Mats Stromberg!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 41st Birthday, George O’Connor!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 76th Birthday, Steranko!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

November 3, 2014

Go, Look: Manuel Kilger

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled Extra: Conundrum Press Announces Acquisition Of Long Red Hair By Meags Fitzgerald For 2015

This is a pretty straight-forward announcement by the Canadian publisher, and one that might be expected given that they were the home for Meags Fitzgerald's well-received first book, Photobooth: A Biography. I didn't catch word of it until after I posted today's "Bundled" column, though, so I'm happy to give it its own entry. It's 84 pages and will be out for the Conundrum debut-heavy TCAF.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: The Enigma Of Knotknee

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Lost CR Sunday Interview Snippet With Renee French

I ran across this chunk of interview with Renee French the other day on my site and could not figure out how something like this could have been separated from our SPX-weekend interview. Then I realized it was from earlier in the year when we arranged to do an interview and I ended up pulling a Vinko Bogataj and the whole thing was abandoned while I stared at the walls for three months, barely moving, humming the Sub-Mariner theme song to myself.

It's been an odd year.

This small chunk of chat seems good to go, though, so I'll present the snippet here to drive some attention to the book French was promoting at the time, Hagelbarger And That Nightmare Goat. That's a really good book in the middle of a strong run of such books for French. I think she's an admirable artist in a lot of ways, and one of them is that she's very prolific. I only hope that we're not so fixated on public personality and distracted by the sheer volume of everything that is coming out that we don't appreciate that kind of accomplishment.

So anyway, if you see it, maybe buy Hagelbarger. I liked it a lot.

*****

TOM SPURGEON: I'm sort of fascinated by the way cartoonists that have been around while work as they settle into a productive period. I have no idea how you work? How much time do you work on comics, how do you orient yourself to that work? Is it different now than it used to be?

RENEE FRENCH: My process has changed over time for sure. I used to start with a story written out longhand, and then marked up, for the panels, thumbnailed from that, then a dummy book, then finally I'd go to finished artwork sticking to the thumbnails, maybe making a few tweaks within each panel. Then a final edit with my editors.

Now, it's kind of sideways. I start drawing a world, making drawings of the different sets within that world, and then, based on sketches, I draw the characters that will live in that world, and then after a lot of finished drawings of the environment and the characters I write the story out longhand. So it's sort of backwards. I still do a dummy book to get the feel for the pacing and where the page turns are.

As for how much time, I mean, I draw more than I do anything else. That doesn't answer the question though does it? Like, all the time. But I don't start until 3pm.

SPURGEON: I know that I see some of your stuff on-line in progress. You know, you have the largest Internet presence of anyone I know that seems completely disinterested in that avenue for self-promotion. Do you spend a lot of time on-line? How do you find it useful?

FRENCH: In 2008 I finally started a blog as a place to post a drawing a day, every day, without skipping a day for a year, as a challenge. It ended up being three years, every day, and it was so valuable to my way of working and organizing my thoughts, and having a place to mark time with images. After three years I let the everyday thing slide, but still posted and still do post as frequently as I can on there. And that habit extended over time to other platforms. I mean, when I make a drawing, I post it. It's a ritual.

SPURGEON: Do you think in terms of self-promotion? You have a very distinctive style, you're personable... how do you feel about that part of making art?

FRENCH: I don't think about it as self promotion so much. I think I've always sucked at self promotion and felt that I let down my publishers when it came to promoting my projects enough. Now I'll post my drawings on twitter when I have a new one, and will announce when I have a new installment of my webcomic, but I feel self conscious about retweeting a positive review or a compliment from someone I admire, so I hardly ever do that. I see Neil Gaiman and other people doing it all the time and think, if Gaiman is doing it... but I get cold feet about it. I promote events I'm doing or books I have coming out, but not enough I think.

It's my least favorite part of making art. I can't think of it as part of making art.

SPURGEON: I know these are impossibly broad, but I have one more in this group. Is it still enjoyable for you to do comics, or is it enjoyable right now? Are there different aspects of making the work that you get a particular satisfaction from accomplishing?

FRENCH: Yes. I do go back and forth about comics vs stand-alone images, though, like the portraits I've been working on lately, but I always come back to telling stories because I love figuring out the puzzle of making them. I love the first seed of an idea, I love walking around with the story in my head, etc., but my favorite bit is still the drawing. It's the most relaxing, most therapeutic thing there is to do. And the older I get the more I love the process, and I've always loved the process. Once the process is over I kind of move on to the next thing. I start doing drawings for the next project right away. Then when the book comes out, it's this artifact that came from the process. But having that artifact is not the best part of it for me. The best part is the work of it. The writing and thumbnailing and drawing day to day. If I didn't love the hell out of the process I wouldn't be doing it anymore.

SPURGEON: At one point I know you were picking publishers according to art direction, or who could make you a nice book -- that's what you told me anyway. Is that different now? How did you end up wanting to work with Rina?

FRENCH: It's different for every book. This book, Hagelbarger and That Nightmare Goat, is a nice small book and I wanted a small, intimate publisher. Rina and I are friends and we both wanted to work on a book together, so her new company Yam Books was a good fit. Plus, I love that Rina's publishing philosophy has a lot in common with Dylan Williams' philosophy at Sparkplug. It's been great working with her on this project. She's one of my favorite people and man, she's got a killer sense of humor and you so need one of those to run an alternative comics publishing company.

*****

*****
*****

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: A Good Cartoon

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Assembled Extra: John Allison Announces End Of Bad Machinery

This surprised me, even though maybe it shouldn't have: John Allison has announced an end to his Bad Machinery series -- about as accomplished and consistent and well-executed a webcomics serial as we've ever seen. Luckily, as far as I can tell it's not a departure from cartooning but a choice to move on through some transitional projecs to whatever the next thing might be. He promises a return for various well-loved characters.

One thing that's a positive about someone that is as prolific as Allison has been is that moving from one project to the next doesn't feel like a lot has been left unexplored or untold -- the printed material from Oni, once ultimately all in one place, will probably make what would be for some a career's worth of space on a bookshelf.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: John Paul Leon Covers For Massive

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Missed It: Milton Griepp’s Franchise Charts Over At ICv2.com

Milton Griepp's charts for various franchises by sales avenue are one of the foundational informational resources on-line, and if you're interested in the shape of the marketplace you should consume them. I'm glad to hear that more shops in the direct market of hobby and comics shops are experiencing growth with female customers, and am my usual baffled that this isn't a market fully pursued and catered to by everyone with a pulse.

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Gabby Schulz Doodle Comics

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked: Publishing News

By Tom Spurgeon

* count Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash as creators debuting works at this weekend's Comic Arts Brooklyn. It's a new book from the Bow-Wow series of wordless picture books, Bow-Wow's Nightmare Neighbors. The Neal Porter Books/Roaring Book Press won't be in bookstores for some weeks yet. It looks something like the image above.

* I'm always a little confused in terms of how Nobrow puts things out for different markets and how they announce books as a result, but I think this Wren McDonald book might be his first stand-alone from an established publisher. That comes ou in August.

* John Pham previews forthcoming work from a future issue of Epoxy.

* yesterday's news-to-follow in the mainstream comics world was DC making official that it would be doing a multiple-worlds event series to coincide with the final move of the offices from New York to Burbank. The article promises that the series will sort out some of the lingering questions from the 2011 reboot of the line. I always find it a little odd that big event series get tasked with editorial clean-up like this, but it's kind of a mainstream comics tradition at this point. They're also working with a new writer for the bulk of this, which is astonishing to me but they've been pretty bold that way over the last few years.

* let's do one more quick CAB preview link, Glancing from Conor Stechschulte.

* here's a preview of the James Stokoe cover for Prophet Vol. 4. That looks pretty great.

* Mark Evanier, who consults on the Pogo series that Fantagraphics has been publishing, celebrates the release of volume three. It's actually pretty amazing that series has continued: there's nothing more difficult than publishing a strip from that specific time period because of the varying quality of the clipped copies means you have to track down either syndicate sheets or originals. Also, the series lost one of its driving forces, Kim Thompson. Pogo is a great, important strip that needs to be reprinted now for the last of its living, saw-it-syndicated fans and, as it gets into libraries, the generations that have no memory of it in newspapers whatsoever.

* finally, this image for a cover to Massive the gay erotic manga anthology from Fantagraphics and spiritual follow-up to the Tagame book that Anne Ishii and Chip Kidd put together for PictureBox has been around for too long with too short of a turnaround to be news, but I like the cover and I like Ishii, Kidd and Graham Kolbeins. The comics look like a lot of fun, too.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In NYC, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Brussels, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Jack Merkow

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Chris Pitzer directed my attention to this Josh Cotter offer of $25,000 for a massive sketchbook that became maybe his best book.

* Richard Bruton on Noises, Lucy The Octopus, Wisher, Poem From A Bus Shelter and Kill My Mother. Rob Clough on What We Need To Know. Sean Gaffney on Vampire Knight Vol. 19. Henry Chamberlain on Megahex. Rob McMonigal on The Deep Ones.

* I love these practical advice posts from Johanna Draper Carlson. I find that most of the PR I get has what I would think of as missing information, although the primary thing that always seems lacking to me is a link to the information I'm receiving posted at their own site -- I think of that as essential post about 2004 or so, although I guess maybe we're on the other side of that being a necessity.

* Bill Everett was the best.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Tom King. Greg Burgas talks to Lucy Bellwood.

* finally, Sean Kleefeld writes about moving on from a life of small-town small-mindedness and the role that comics had to play in kind of wedging open that door for him.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

November 2, 2014

Go, Look: Lote Vilma

posted 10:30 pm PST | Permalink

Twenty Years Ago Today Marvel Bought Out Malibu

Tom Mason dropped me an e-mail this morning -- it likely went out to others, but I'm not all the way certain about that -- that today marks the 20th year anniversary of the Marvel/Malibu deal. He noted that his one-time co-worker and long-time friend Paul O'Connor commemorated the event here, complete with lovely memo jpegs.

I made a joke on twitter that this buyout was the instigating event for an extended run of goofy decisions by the entire comics industry. I'm not sure that's true -- I'm certain that if you look hard enough there are earlier business deals. What I remember in covering the industry at the time is that this seemed like an event very focused on then-recent industry woes that brought to bear a decision-making process of a kind with the later Diamond deals and bankruptcies. It was a really interesting time, that's for sure.

posted 10:27 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Early Wally Wood Art

posted 10:26 pm PST | Permalink

Two New Cartoons Drive Heated Political Response

Two news stories about political cartoons seem close enough in nature I thought I'd gather them together here. I'm always a little confused by reading of cartoonst that seeks to infuse them with the direct expression of a political idea by people no making the cartoon.

* an extremely blunt criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu that compares his policy-making to the actions taken by 9/11 terrorists is garnering the usual that-was-uncalled-for reaction. The problem with most pushback against cartoons is that they assume some sort of external standard for political rhetoric that simply doesn't exist. In pushing this assertion, critics runk the risk of blowing past whatever a cartoon might be saying of value about an issue or person. The problem with the original cartoons against which pushback might happen is that they very frequently don't have much to say, of value or otherwise, and in some cases really are just sort of positioning ideas in proximity to one another to make a criticism that would fail to bear up to even a minimum of cross-examination. I think we have a little bit of both operating here. The Times article does point out a pair of important contexts in this particular case: the sometimes hostile relationship between Netanyahu-era Isarel and the Obama-era US, and the fact that there are conspiracy theorists that will take this kind of thing as affirmation and encouragement.

* I'm fond of what brought a UKIP-related cartoon to the attention of politicians and those interested in politics in and around Dover: a UKIP supporter re-posting the cartoon as social media because he thought the criticisms were funny. This has led to a discussion not just of the issues but of the British tradition of self-deprecation. There is an element in political cartooning right now where the stew of opinions can be so severe it kind of resists commentary, even of the self-driven variety. To laugh at something is to normalize it. Throwing the thought that "maybe this isn't funny" doesn't garner you a lot of cool points, but it's definitely a part of negotiating the current political landscape in a variety of countries.

posted 10:25 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Three From Virgil Partch’s Big George!

posted 10:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Anthony Haden-Guest On Puck Magazine

The critic and sometimes cartoonist Anthony Haden-Guest has a piece up at The Daily Beast about Puck magazine, using IDW's publication of the massive history and art book What Fools These Mortals Be! as its springboard. I want to pull the link out and into its own post for the quality of some of the writer's observations but also because that's a gorgeous-loooking book I'm currently right in the middle of consuming and I haven't seen a whole lot of talk about it. We should talk about it. Haden-Guest paints the magazine's accomplishments in broad strokes and notes that at the end of its run you can see a shift away from the sumptuous art and criticism of its time to a heavier reliance on editorial art that's more directly communicative and even photography.

What interests me about a book like this one is that as someone that grew up during a really fallow period for comics and cartooning, I may tend to automatically divide the virtuosic from the subtly-expressed as a defense mechanism that allows me to engage more easily with a variety of styles and approaches, even unpopular or ugly ones. That viewpoint wants to process something like the art-making in Puck as a broadly-appealing display of craft, a performance, that seeks to lock in an audience happy to see that kind of visual splendor on the page divorced from meaning and nuance. It's kind of a dumb way of looking at things, and many of the cartoons in this books are as fully engaged on a variety of levels as any of the super-smarties currently dissecting our culture in graphic novel form. Puck faded at almost the exact time comic strips as we understand them today coelesced, and I wonder if there isn't a huge element of comics-making that isn't best described in terms of a falling away from a grander age in terms of entire modes of expression.

posted 10:15 pm PST | Permalink

Not Comics: Magazine Illustrations By Kikuo Johnson

posted 10:10 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Musa Kart Reacts To His Latest Court Trouble

There's a fairly significant news piece here about the Turkish cartoonist Musa Kart and his reaction to a recent acquittal on charges brought against him by the country's leading political figure Recep Erdogan that could have landed the artist in jail for almost a decade. I actually don't see the headline's claim in here, that things have gotten worse -- they sound the same, if any characterization of that kind is made at all -- but there are several intriguing conversation points. One is Kart's reminder that this use of the courts was a conscious decision on Erdogan's part. He's right. That's something we do here, treat legal options as if they're competing inducements, and you just can't apply that kind of logic to this case. Another is that there might be an appeal of this latest decision, which seems to me both a potentiality and an outcome, the latter for the fear and trepidation the cartoonist must feel with this kind of thing having over his head. The third is Kart's touching reaction to the support he received from fellow cartoonists around the world, given that his plight didn't really break as an international news story until days before the most recent court decision.

Let's hope that for the future all of the cartoons that Kart feels in the middle of are happy ones.

posted 10:05 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Pages From Black Panther #40

i try not to link to swipe-posts of copyrighted comics that aren't recontextualized in some way, but I was struck by this art and don't know the artist Jefte Palo

posted 10:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Read: Brian Cremins On Curse Of The Werewolf

The scholar Brian Cremins has written a personal essay about the Power Records/Marvel Comics Curse Of The Werewolf effort for LA Review Of Books. If you're a a fan at all of how an expression of pop culture can be a significant touchstone for someone sometimes because of, sometimes distinct from, the quality of the work represented -- this might be a good essay for you. One thing that's nice about the piece is that Cremins engages with this particular comic in his own life but also touches on horror comics in general, in part by bringing in astute observations from a couple of other writers. That continuity of horror imagery and character was very powerful to me at a young age, and I wonder if it's for the same broad reasons.

posted 9:55 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Amazing Blutch Western Drawing

via

posted 3:30 pm PST | Permalink

Comics By Request: People, Places In Need Of Funding

By Tom Spurgeon

* Greg Theakston would like to raise $30,000 to turn a 1980s interview with Jack Kirby into a professional-looking thing to watch.

* it looks like Dan Vado is moving on a bit from his GoFundMe campaign, which netted $13K or an asked-for $85K and has moved onto a Patreon campaign he hopes will be more effective. He'll still accept donations at the GoFundMe, of course, it just isn't the main focus of his crowd-funding efforts.

* Shaenon Garrity's latest Skin Horse crowd-funder is headed into its final week. Those always do well.

* here's one of the two dozen or so crowdfunding projects for which I get PR. That's always a weird thing to me, getting PR before a project is even financed, but I supposed I shouldn't have a problem wrapping my mind around that being a part of things now.

* I'm always interested in conventions and festivals that use crowd funding as a tool: here's one for a one-day show in Campbell, California.

* always a big fan of comics-related crafts.

* finally, the writer James Hudnall -- whose goal was met last Friday -- provides an update on his situation. We wish him all the best in a dark circumstance.

posted 3:25 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Nantes, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In NYC, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In London, I’d Go To This

posted 3:20 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: The Night Of The Demon

posted 3:10 pm PST | Permalink

Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Sean Gaffney on The Garden Of Words and No Game No Life Vol. 1. Rob Clough on Amerika. Todd Klein on Godhead #1. Johanna Draper Carlson on Action Philosphers: The Tenth Anniversary Uberedition, The Wicked + The Divine #5 and Critical Hit #1-2. Kelly Thompson on Starlight #6. J. Caleb Mozzocco on Tales Of The TMNT #5. Michael Buntag on a pair of comic book premieres.

* oh, Crumb.

* I didn't get this link up before Halloween, but that shouldn't stop you from appreciating the good place in which Gene Colan and Tom Palmer found themselves as artists on Tomb Of Dracula in the 1970s.

* Nevs Coleman talks to Gary Spencer Millidge. Robin McConnell and Brandon Graham talk to Emily Carroll and Eleanor Davis. Dan Berry talks to Darryl Cunningham.

* speaking of Cunningham, he provides an op-ed on Ayn Rand here. It is sort of interesting to think of popular thinkers in terms of why and how they come back into some sort of semi-prominence or pertinence. It's interesting when I visit my home town who people are talking about over meals and at parties.

* on the idea of Previews as a primary source from which to garner ordering information.

* finally, I greatly enjoyed this interview with Oliver East about his work with the Lakes Festival. It's good to see him supported in that way.

posted 3:05 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 39th Birthday, Zack Soto!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 53rd Birthday, Tom Grindberg!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 61st Birthday, Tom Lyle!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 40th Birthday, Karen Sneider!

posted 3:00 pm PST | Permalink

A Bunch Of Marvel Wide-Panels On Steve Ditko’s 87th Birthday

Steve Ditko's done a lot things extremely well in his long career as a comics artist and cartoonist; one of my favorites is his employment of wide panels Marvel during its 1960s heyday. On the occasion of Ditko's 87th birthday I went and looked a bunch. Here are some of them.

*****

*****
*****

posted 12:00 am PST | Permalink

November 1, 2014

Go, Look: Genre Subject Paintings By Jeffrey Catherine Jones

posted 6:00 pm PST | Permalink

Go, Look: Theo Ellsworth Has An Etsy Store

posted 6:00 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Nantes, I’d Go To This

posted 5:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Portugal, I’d Go To This

posted 5:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Winnipeg, I’d Go To This

posted 5:20 pm PST | Permalink

If I Were In Lucca, I’d Go To This

posted 5:20 pm PST | Permalink

Happy 87th Birthday, Steve Ditko!

posted 5:00 pm PST | Permalink

FFF Results Post #400—Issues #401 Or Greater

On Friday, CR readers were asked to "Name Five Comic Books With An Issue Number Of 401 Or Greater That You've Enjoyed." This is how they responded.

*****

Rob Salkowitz

1. Detective Comics #442
2. Detective Comics #408
3. Adventure Comics #431
4. Four Color Comics #456
5. Batman #404

*****

Tom Spurgeon

1. Action Comics #583
2. The Uncanny X-Men #522
3. Adventures Of Superman #612
4. Fantastic Four #554
5. MAD #500

*****

Douglas Wolk

1. 2000 AD Prog 1807
2. Detective Comics #500
3. Amazing Spider-Man #605
4. Journey Into Mystery #645
5. Adventure Comics #467

*****

Dave Knott

* Spirou #2297
* Batman #666
* Journey Into Mystery #646
* Action Comics #579
* Detective Comics #474

*****

Tom Bondurant

1. Detective Comics #500
2. Wonder Woman #600
3. Adventure Comics #463
4. Superman #666
5. Amazing Spider-Man #657

*****

Mike Pfefferkorn

1. Four Color #456
2. Adventure Comics #462
3. Detective Comics #402
4. Action Comics #560
5. Action Comics #858

*****

Oliver Ristau

1. Action Comics #603
2. Adventure Comics #431
3. Detective Comics #854
4. Gespenster Geschichten #1600
5. Thor #404

*****

Matt Emery

1. 2000AD Prog 1505
2. Commando #4748 -- love Peter Ford's war comics.
3. Eagle #505 Last issue of the eighties iteration of Eagle, a shame it couldn't achieve the longevity of 2000AD.
4. Battle Picture Library #782
5. Bunty #2249 The last UK girls comic standing

*****

Scott Dunbier

1) Detective Comics #439
Night of the Stalker by Sal Amendola and Steve Englehart is my favorite Batman story. Also has the third chapter of Manhunter, The Resurrection of Paul Kirk, by Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson. The perfect comic.

2) Detective Comics #442
The great Batman story Death Flies the Haunted Sky by Alex Toth, script by Goodwin. Also, To Duel the Master, the second to last Manhunter story by Goodwin and Simonson, has one of the greatest fights ever in comics.

3) Detective Comics #443
Gotterdammerung, the final Manhunter story has him teaming up with Batman. Goodwin and Simonson wrap up one of the classic seriesâ€™ of the 1970s in perfect fashion.

4) Detective Comics #450
Another Walter Simonson Batman, but this time written by Elliot S! Maggin. Walter turns Batman into a four-foot high gargoyleâ€”and it works. Just a really good Batman yarn.

5) Detective Comics #475/476
This one's a tie, a wonderful two-part story but Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin. The Laughing Fish and The Sign of the Joker. The best of their terrific run.

*****

I deleted a pair of entries that didn't come very close to answering the question. Sorry, folks.

This feature will return this year but is suspended for CAB weekend and probably for ICAF, too.

*****
*****

posted 4:00 pm PST | Permalink

The Comics Reporter Video Parade

Francoise Mouly, Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman

Lynda Barry At SPX 2014

Dan & Toby Comic Talk 1989

Renee French Draws

Terry LaBan Speaks

posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink

CR Week In Review

The top comics-related news stories from October 25 to October 31, 2014:

1. Wallace Wood Properties LLC sues Tatjana Wood for return of Wally Wood art.

2. An ambitious crowd-funder for a suite of Osamu Tezuka-related works seems to stall in the early, momentum-building stages due in part to scrutiny from industry observers and interested fans, potentially marking a change in crowd-funding strategies and in the publishing fate for English language Tezuka efforts.

3. PW launches this year's orgy of Best-Of lists.

Winners Of The Week
The Swann Foundation winners. Getting the ability to travel and study for your dissertation or your first important post-doctoral work has a chance to be life-changing.

Losers Of The Week
Still the Gamers, although the potential irony in some people flipping out at a line in the linked-to NYT piece as if it were a personal assault was noted.

Quote Of The Week
"It's not sitting down at a keyboard and writing a script and thinking, oh shit, what's the next line? I sit with cheap notebooks or cheap sketchbooks and just fill them up with ideas and maybe pieces of dialogue and bits and pieces. I keep circulating through all those notes. Go back to those notes. So nothing feels cut in stone or permanent. It all feels like it's open and I can move in any direction that I want.

"It's starting with a lot of information and slowly, slowly distilling it down to something that's concrete. So maybe that says something about my personality that I'm very cautious and very careful about all that stuff, but I don't have the kind of brain that can sit down and write beautiful dialogue and a beautiful story. There's people who certainly can do that work really quickly and just do amazing work, but I don't have that facility unfortunately. I wish I did, but I don't." -- Charles Burns

posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink

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